The Brownings and 
America 



By 
ELIZABETH PORTER GOULD 

Author of " One's Self I Sing and Other Poems ; " " Anne Gilchrist 

and Walt Whitman;" "John Adams and Daniel Webster 

as Schoolmasters;" " Ezekiel Cheever: Schoolmaster," 

" A Pioneer Doctor : A Story of the Seventies," etc. 



BOSTON 

THE POET-LORE COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 

1904 



Copyright 1904 by Elizabeth Porter Gould 



All rights reserved 



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L1BRARV nf CONGRESS 
Two CoDJes Receivefl 

JUL 19 1904 

<L Cocyrlfirht Entry 
CLAS$ *- XXO. No. 
COPY B 



PRINTED AT 

THE GORHAM PRESS 

BOSTON, U. S. A. 



The Brownings and America 



THE BROWNINGS AND 
AMERICA 



FROM the first of their literary career, 
America not only honored the Brownings, 
but the Brownings honored America. At 
an early age Mrs. Browning, as Elizabeth 
Barrett, had read Paine's Age of Reason, and in 
her Essay on Mind, published in 1826, had re- 
ferred in the Rights of Man to his argument in 
the throne's defense instead of against monarchy. 
In the same Essay she had referred to Washing- 
ton Irving as striking " Pierian chords." But 
when Edgar Allan Poe dedicated to her his little 
volume of thirty poems, " The Raven and other 
Poems; New York; Wiley and Putnam: 1845," 
her interest naturally became more personal. She 
fully appreciated the dedicatory words: 

" To the Noblest of her Sex — To the Author 
of ' The Drama of Exile ' — To Miss Elizabeth 
Barrett Barrett of England, I dedicate this Vol- 
ume, with the most Enthusiastic Admiration, and 
with the most Sincere Esteem — E. A. P." 



io THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

Receiving such seemed to her, as she wrote in 
reply (April, 1846), " to authorize or, at least, to 
encourage " her to try to express what she had 
long felt, her sense of the high honor he had done 
her in his country and hers, in the dedication of 
his poems. " It is too great a distinction," she 
continues, " conferred by a hand of too liberal 
generosity. I wish for my own sake I were 
worthy of it. But I may endeavor, by future 
work, to justify a little what I cannot deserve 
anywise now. For it, meanwhile, I may be grate- 
ful, because gratitude is the virtue of the hum- 
blest." After this " imperfect acknowledgment " 
of her personal obligation, she goes on to thank 
him, as another reader would thank him, for this 
" vivid writing, this power which is felt ! Your 
Raven," she declares, " has produced a sensation, 
a ' fit horror ' here in England. Some of my 
friends are taken by the fear of it and some by 
the music. I hear of persons haunted by the 
' Nevermore,' and one acquaintance of mine who 
has the misfortune of possessing a bust of Pallas 
never can bear to look at it in the twilight." She 
then tells that " our great poet, Mr. Browning, 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA n 

the author of ' Paracelsus ' and the ' Bells and 
Pomegranates/ was struck much by the rhythm 
of that poem." 

From four different quarters, besides from the 
author himself, she had received the Raven when 
it had only a newspaper life. But though it had 
for her an " uncommon voice and effect," she 
could not feel " the immoderate joy " her friend 
John Kenyon felt upon reading it. " It is the 
rhythm which has taken him with glamour, I 
fancy." This, as she wrote Mr. Home in May, 
1845, " acted excellently upon the imagination, 
the ' Nevermore ' having a solemn chime ; " yet 
the poem did not seem to her to be the " natural 
expression of a sane intellect in whatever mood." 
She thought this should be specified in its title. 
She felt that some of the lyrics had power of a 
" less questionable sort." She even declared that 
Poe showed more faculty in his account of that 
horrible mesmeric experience (mad or not mad) 
than in his poems. This tale of mesmerism (The 
Case of M. Valdemar) which she wrote him she 
did not find in the dedicatory volume, but which 
was going the round of the newspapers, was 



i2 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

throwing them all into " most admired disorder " 
and " dreadful doubts as to whether it could be 
true, as the children said of ghost stories." But 
she had to confess to the " power of the writer, 
and the faculty he had of making horrible im- 
probabilities seem near and familiar." 

While Miss Barrett was reading Poe's works 
he was reading hers; for about this time his 
friend Mrs. Frances S. Osgood, in sending the 
English poet a volume of her Poems from Amer- 
ica, wrote that she ought to come to New York 
" only to see Mr. Poe's wild eyes flash through 
tears," when he read her verses. Could she then 
have entered the little Fordham cottage where 
the loved young wife Virginia was slowly dying 
she would have seen among the books on the little 
hanging bookshelf hers and Mr. Browning's hold- 
ing posts of honor ; and she would have seen the 
" quiet exultation " with which Poe drew from 
his pocket to read to a friend who tells it the 
letter he had received from Miss Barrett. It 
would have rejoiced his sensitive heart could he 
have heard years later (1851) the conversation 
between the Brownings and his literary friend 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 13 

John R. Thompson when they declared they had 
formed " an ardent and just admiration " of the 
author of The Raven, and felt a " strong desire 
to see his memory vindicated from moral asper- 
sion." (Harrison's Life of Poe.) 

Not only the American poets, but the Ameri- 
can magazines and papers, early appreciated this 
gifted woman's work; notably the Arcturus, a 
New York journal edited by Cornelius Mathews 
and Evert A. Duyckinck (February, 1841) ; the 
North American Reviezu of July, 1842 ; Graham's 
Magazine of December, 1842; Democratic Re- 
view of July and October, 1844 > an d the Evening 
Mirror of December 7, 1844. 

The writer in the North American Review, in 
taking up the three publications she, as Miss 
Barrett, had then published,* began by confess- 
ing ignorance of the author as " to her lineage, 
education, tastes, and (last and not least where a 
lady is concerned) her personal attractions." 

* An Essay on Mind, with other Poems, London, 
1826 ; Prometheus Bound, translated from the Greek of 
^schylus, and Miscellaneous Poems by the Translator. 
London, 1833; The Seraphim, and other Poems. Lon- 
don, 1838. 



i 4 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

But he revealed a Yankee shrewdness which must 
have amused the author when he stated that the 
solitary fact he was able to gather from her 
poetry was — her age ; for learning on good au- 
thority that her first volume was published at the 
age of seventeen, a guess might be given as to 
result. After sixteen pages of remarks on the 
poems, several of which he copied, he took leave 
of Miss Barrett with " a sincere admiration of 
her genius, her learning, and the tone of moral 
and religious feeling which elevates and sanctifies 
poetry." If he had spoken plainly of her faults 
it was " because she could bear it." She had 
" great gifts," and could do " better things than 
she had yet done, if she would chastise the lawless 
extravagance of her genius, beget in the whirl- 
wind of her inspiration a temperance that shall 
give it smoothness, and let in the light of day 
upon those mazy and mystic labyrinths of thought 
in which she delights to lose herself and bewilder 
her readers. Her faults are excesses and not 
defects, overflowings and not shortcomings, the 
wild futility of a too luxuriant, and not the hun- 
ger-bitten poverty of a meagre soul. Let her re- 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 15 

member that extravagance is not power, that to 
be obscure is not to be profound; to be mystical 
is not to be sublime ; and that genius in its high- 
est flight of ecstasy with all its robes and singing 
garlands about it must be guided and controlled 
by a law as unslumbering and unerring as that 
which brings back the far depths of infinite 
space." 

This critic's condemnation of The Seraphim 
was all Miss Barrett referred to in sending the 
magazine to her friend and correspondent, Mr. 
Hugh Stuart Boyd. " It seems to me," she 
wrote, " it is not too hard. The poem wants 
unity." In her Preface to it, she had declared 
that she assumed " no power of art except that 
power of love towards it which had remained 
with her from childhood's days." Without " dis- 
paraging speeches, and yet with a self-distrust 
amounting to emotion," she had offered her 
poetry to the public, and for the first time in her 
own name, not " because there was a public, but 
because it was thought and felt." She hoped to 
write better verses — but she never could " feel 
more intensely than at that moment the sub- 



16 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

lime uses of poetry and the solemn responsibilities 
of the poet." 

Her confession later (August, 1844), that the 
Americans, and perhaps she herself, were of the 
opinion that she had made great progress since 
The Seraphim was written (" It seems to me that 
I have more reach whether as thought or lan- 
guage ") may have led her unsigned critic of the 
North American Review to feel that he had pos- 
sibly had a share in the progress. Who knows? 

The Democratic Review, of July, 1844, in com- 
plimenting her, declared that her poems " gen- 
erated the sweetest union of womanly tenderness 
of heart and masculine loftiness and power of 
intellect." It compared her to Mrs. Norton. 

The review in the Editor's Table of the Gra- 
ham's Magazine called her the " learned poetess 
of the day," and declared her " productions 
unique in this age of lady authors. They have 
the touch of nature in common with the best; 
they have, too, sentiment, passion, and fancy in 
the highest degree without reminding us of Mrs. 
Hemans, Mrs. Norton, or L. E. L." Like the 
North American Review, it copied entire the 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 17 

poem The Sleep, Cowper's Grave, and several 
others. In sending the magazine to Mr. Boyd 
(January, 1843) sne wrote that " however ex- 
travagant " the review was in its appreciation, 
she felt it would give " his kindness pleasure. 
I confess," she adds, " to a good deal of pleasure 
myself from these American courtesies, expressed 
not merely in the magazines but in the news- 
papers." She tells of receiving a magazine from 
America containing The Cry of the Human, 
which a correspondent told her was considered 
there " one of her most successful poems." She 
doubts whether he would think so. " But tell 
me exactly what you do think ? " she asks. Her 
faith in the opinions of this learned, blind friend 
is noticeable through all the correspondence. 
" Here was the daughter that Milton should have 
had ! " exclaims Edmund Clarence Stedman in 
his Victorian Poets. 

In her letters she refers to the American papers 
sent her — the Nezv York Tribune, The Union, 
The Union Flag — as being " scattered over with 
extracts from her books, and benignant words 
about their author." 



1 8 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

The Graham's Magazine, which contained the 
review above mentioned, had, under the title 
Sonnets, the four we now know as Grief, Super- 
stition, Work, and Work and Contemplation. 
For these she received fifty dollars. They had 
been sent to Arcturus, but having arrived after 
the discontinuance of that periodical, its editors 
had sent them to Graham's, thinking that the 
" good company into which they would be intro- 
duced there would be every way agreeable to the 
fair authoress." The following year (1843) a P _ 
peared in different issues of the magazine her 
Caterina to Camoens, Seraph and Poet, The 
Soul's Expression, and The Child and the 
Watcher. In 1844 appeared Loved Once, The 
Lady's Yes, and Pain in Pleasure. The last was 
signed E. B. B., the others Elizabeth B. Barrett. 
The year before (1843) na d appeared in The 
Pioneer, the short-lived periodical edited by 
James Russell Lowell and Robert Carter, The 
Maiden's Death, a poem of thirty-four lines. 
Lowell, in referring to this, wrote to a friend. 
" She promises more in a very pleasant letter." 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 19 

The various requests from the United States 
for contributions from her pen led the poet to 
feel, as she wrote Mr. Boyd, that the Americans 
were " as good-natured to her as if they took her 
for the high Radical " she was. Upon receiv- 
ing in April, 1845, a letter from " a poet in Mas- 
sachusetts and another from a poetess ; — the he 
Mr. Lowell, the she Mrs. Sigourney," she con- 
fessed to her blind friend that " the sound of 
my poetry is stirring the deep green forests of 
the New World ; which sounds pleasantly, does 
it not?" 

Another American critic, Henry T. Tucker- 
man, was sounding her praise in his Thoughts 
on the Poets, published in 1848. He felt that 
she was not only " an honor to her sex," but 
that " no member thereof could fail to derive 
advantage from the spirit of her muse," for it 
spoke words of " heroic cheer," and suggested 
" thoughtful courage, sublime resignation, and 
exalted hope." He declared that her " reviews 
were imbued with the spirit of antique models. 
The scholar was everywhere coevident with the 
poet." In this respect he thought she differed 



2o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

from Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Norton, in " whose 
effusions enthusiasm gave the tone and color." 

Upon receiving from Mr. Cornelius Mathews 
his Poems on Man, she complimented him by 
using a line from The Poet — 

Fill all the stops of life with tuneful breath — 

as a heading to her poem A Rhapsody of Life's 
Progress. His kindness to her caused her to 
write him to know as much of his " intellectual 
habits " as he taught her of his " genial feelings." 
She expressed her thanks for the Pathfinder he 
sent her (" what an excellent name for an Ameri- 
can journal," she exclaimed), which contained 
what seemed to her a somewhat harsh notice of 
the Blot on the Scutcheon of Robert Browning. 
This was in April, 1843. As she had not then 
seen the poet, or even known him by correspond- 
ence, what she wrote Mr. Mathews has a particu- 
lar interest in the light of what followed: 
" Whether through fellow-feeling for Eleusinian 
mysteries, or whether through the more generous 
motive of appreciation of his powers, I am very 
sensitive to the thousand and one stripes with 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 21 

which the assembly of critics doth expound its 
vocation over him ; and the Athaeneum, for in- 
stance, made me quite cross and misanthropic 
last week. The truth is — it is easier to find a 
more faultless writer than a poet of equal genius. 
Don't let us fall into the category of the sons of 
Noah. Noah was once drunk, indeed, but once 
he built the ark." She then goes on to ask if the 
Graham's Miscellany would care for occasional 
contributions from her friend Richard Hengist 
Home. If so, she thinks she could manage an 
arrangement upon the same terms as her en- 
gagement rested. 

Some months later (November, 1843), she 
wrote Mr. Home that Mr. Mathews had written 
her he was delighted with his Orion, and was 
going to send him some poems of his own as 
" homage from the West." She said he desired 
her to make known generally that " a copyright 
club for the protection of authors poor and 
honest " was being established at New York 
with Mr. Bryant as president and he, Mr. 
Mathews, as secretary ; and that " we are all to 
be protected most effectually." In a previous 



22 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

letter to Mr. Mathews she had referred to a 
pamphlet on international copyright as " welcome 
at a distance," but it had not " come near her 
yet." This refers to one of the speeches he had 
made in New York city, doubtless the one pub- 
lished at the office of Arcturus a few days after 
its delivery in City Hall in February, 1842. It 
would have a special interest to the English poet, 
aside from its subject, because delivered at a 
dinner given in honor of her compatriot Charles 
Dickens. Washington Irving, then at the height 
of his literary reputation, was the president of the 
occasion. He had known diplomatic life in 
London as Secretary of the Legation, and was 
just then nominated by the Senate — Daniel 
Webster Secretary of State — as Minister to 
Spain. A letter sent to Dickens upon reading 
his story of Little Nell had caused them from that 
time, as Dickens afterward said, " to shake hands, 
auto graphically, across the Atlantic." But his 
being asked to preside upon this occasion was 
doubtless more from his interest in the interna- 
tional copyright law, " so long and so ineffecually 
pressed upon Congress ; " for some two years 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 23 

before (January, 1840) he had defined his posi- 
tion by a letter to the editor of The Knicker- 
bocker, in which he declared that for himself 
his " literary career as an author was drawing to 
a close, and could not be much affected by any 
disposition of the question," but he felt there was 
a " young literature springing up and daily un- 
folding itself with wonderful energy and luxuri- 
ance, which, as it promised to shed a grace and 
lustre upon the nation," deserved its " fostering 
care." Although confessing himself no speech- 
maker, Mr. Irving was happy in his remarks on 
this occasion, for, having proposed the sentiment 
" International Copyright," he said : " It is but 
fair that those who have laurels for their brows 
should be permitted to browse on their laurels." 
To this Mr. Mathews responded, closing with, 
"An International Copyright — The only honest 
turnpike between the readers of two great 
nations." 

Though strong in feeling on the subject of 
international rights, the Brownings ever appre- 
ciated the effort of the United States to be fair. 
Referring one time to the " vantage ground of 



24 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

American pirates " concerning republishing, Mrs. 
Browning wrote her friend Miss Mitford : " For 
my part, I have every possible reason to thank 
and love America; she has been very kind to 
me." In a letter to Mr. Boyd in 1844, she noted 
the spirit of a Philadelphia bookseller who, hav- 
ing announced the publication of the Drama of 
Exile as soon as it should reach America, aban- 
doned the idea upon hearing that a New York 
publisher had proof-sheets direct from the author 
for its publication. This act of the Americans, in 
" commanding an American edition to come out 
either a little before, or simultaneously with, the 
English one, and provided with a separate preface 
for themselves," gave the author pleasure. Upon 
the appearance of the work, she informed her 
friend Mrs. Martin (November, 1844) that the 
copies of the American edition " dazzled the 
English one ; " one or two reviews were " trans- 
atlantically transcended in vilee flatterie." 

Among these reviews of the Drama of Exile 
and other poems was that of Margaret Fuller, 
who, despite some unfavorable criticism, de- 
clared that " in vigor and nobleness of concep- 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 25 

tion, depth of spiritual experience, and com- 
mand of classic allusion," Miss Barrett was 
" above any female writer the world had yet 
known." She felt it was " a happiness for the 
critic when, as in the present instance, his task 
was mainly how to express a cordial admiration ; 
to indicate an intelligence of beauties rather than 
regret for defects ! " Among the poems of the 
book her favorite seemed to be the Rhyme of the 
Dutchess May. Possibly she was as much im- 
pressed as we all are today with those sublime 
lines : 

And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around 

our incompleteness, 
'Round our restlessness, His rest. 

Mrs. Browning was sane as well as sensi- 
tive in her ideas of reviews. She could say what 
Hawthorne wrote to Poe, after having read his 
occasional notices of his works : " I care for 
nothing but the truth, and shall always much 
more readily accept a harsh truth in regard to 
my writings than a sugared falsehood." She 
once declared to Mrs. Martin that as she had 
never reached her own ideal she could not expect 



26 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

to have satisfied other people's expectation. " But 
it is (as I sometimes say) the least ignoble part 
of me that I love poetry better than I love my own 
success in it." The same year she wrote Mr. 
Westland : " It is awful enough, this looking for- 
ward to be reviewed. Never mind, the ultimate 
prosperity of the book lies far above the critics, 
and can neither be mended nor made nor unmade 
by them." 

When upon the publication of the Drama of 
Exile pleasant words came to her, she confided 
to Mr. Boyd (August, 1844) that she hoped it 
was " not wrong to be pleased " at the " kind 
spirit, the spirit of eager kindness indeed," with 
which the Americans received the poetry. " In 
this country (England)," she concluded, "there 
may be mortifications waiting for me quite enough 
to keep my modesty in a state of cultivation ; I 
do not know." 

When condemnation did come, as for instance 
in that of Aurora Leigh, by her English friends., 
she comforted herself with the thought that her 
American publishers " shed tears of sympathy " 
over the proofs (humorously adding, however, 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 27 

that perhaps it was in reference to the one hun- 
dred pounds they had to pay for them !) ; and that 
the critics congratulated her upon having worked 
herself clear " of affectations, mannerisms, and 
other morbidities." Possibly she thought of the 
consolation Bayard Taylor gave, upon calling on 
her in Paris, when she was about publishing the 
poem. " She feels a little nervous about it," he 
wrote the Stoddards in New York (Aug. 4, 
1856). " I told her she should not, for if it was 
good it would surely be appreciated some time or 
other, and, if not, the sooner it was damned the 
better ; to which polite remark she agreed." If 
she could have looked into the American home of 
Celia and Levi Thaxter, she would have seen 
them reading with delight the new book. " Such 
good evenings as we have ! " wrote Mrs. Thaxter 
to her friend E. C. Hoxie (1857). " They are so 
fascinating sometimes we don't break up the 
meeting till after ten. We draw the table up to 
the roomy fire and I take my work and Levi reads 
to me; first he reads Aurora (and you're an 
abominable woman for not thinking it the beau- 
tifullest book that ever was written), then Dred, 



28 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

which in spite of the little bird-women, horrid 
little things, we enjoy." 

Or, if she could have seen the letter a young 
student at the Alexandria Theological Seminary, 
afterwards famous as Phillips Brooks, was writ- 
ing to a friend concerning this same Aurora 
Leigh (which he read " as soon as it was out "), 
she would have been pleased ; for in it he de- 
clared he did not need to say that he was en- 
thusiastic over it, as he had been over almost 
everything that Mrs. Browning ever wrote. . . . 
" It is a great book," he was proud to say, " the 
book of the year beyond all question, so far as 
poetry or light literature, if it be light, goes." 
The year before (1856), in thoughts written out 
after leaving Harvard College, he had referred 
to the Preface of the first American edition of 
her Poems, which he had been reading, where she 
refers to poetry as being to her " as serious a 
thing as life itself." 

In the few lines he quoted he declared we had 
the " key to the spirit of every poem in the volume 
which they introduced. We say of every poem, 
and say it consideringly. For there is no poet 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 29 

that we can recall through the whole range of our 
English poetry who has so distinctive a character 
and who lives so constantly in that character as 
Mrs. Browning. The great reality, sincerity, and 
significance of all life is what is always weighing 
on her heart or opens her lips; it is this which 
always breaks forth into verse." He felt that 
Mrs. Browning was herself in her poetry from 
the first line to the last. " Devotion and sincerity 
like hers," this youth of twenty declared, " are 
personal, individual things belonging to each man 
and each woman apart from all other men and 
women, coinciding, if they coincide at all, by 
accident and not by agreement. Individuality 
then, a distinct, refined, personal character, is 
stamped on all her works. The strength of her 
thoughts is strong because they are peculiarly her 
own, no less her own because others have thought 
the same." The Sonnets from the Portuguese, 
as read conscientiously and carefully, he pro- 
nounced as " most beautiful, giving new, fresh, 
ever more intimate views of their author's char- 
acter and experience." As read in connection 
with Mr. Browning's dedication of his Men and 



3 o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

Women, which was the other side of the picture, 
he felt the whole was " complete," revealing " the 
deep love of two souls as capable of the best and 
truest love as any two that breathe." 

All this reminds one of what Edmund Clarence 
Stedman said of the Sonnets in his essay on Mrs. 
Browning, that it was " no sacrilege to say that 
their music was showered from a higher and 
purer atmosphere than that of the Swan of 
Avon." 

Later, when her Poems of Congress received 
disapprobation in England, Mrs. Browning again 
looked over the sea ; for, as addressed to America, 
it had been considered rather " an amiable and 
domestic trait on her part. But England ! Heav- 
ens and Earth ! What a crime ! The very suspicion 
of it is guilt." Hearing still further criticism of 
her work, she wrote Miss Ha worth (i860) : " For 
the rest, being turned out of the old world I fall 
on my feet in the new world, where people have 
been generous and even publishers turned liberal. 
Think of my having an offer (on the ground of 
that book) from a periodical in New York of one 
hundred dollars for every single poem, though as 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 31 

short as a sonnet, that is, for its merely passing 
through their pages on the road to the publishers 
proper." Writing to Mrs. Jameson of the " ex- 
travagant praises and prices which had been 
offered her from over the western sea, in conse- 
quence of these Poems before Congress" she 
added : " The nation is generous in these things 
and not thin-skinned." She then told her she 
was working at some Italian lyrics, several of 
which she had sent to the New York Independent* 
After the appearance of these Napoleonic 
Poems Mrs. Browning wrote an American friend : 
" My book has had a very angry reception in my 
native country, as you probably observe, but I 



* The following eleven Poems published in thirteen 
months' time — from June 7, i860, to July 25, 1861 — are 
now found in the files of that paper : " First News from 
Villa France" (June 7, i860) ; "King Victor Emmanuel 
entering Florence" (August 16, i860) ; "The Sword of 
Castruccio Castrocani " (August 30, i860) ; " Summing- 
up in Italy" (Sept. 27, i860): "Garibaldi" (October 
11, i860); "De Profundus " (Dec. 6, i860); "Parting 
Lovers " (March 21, 1861) ; "Mother and Poet" (May 
2, t86i) ; "Only a Curl" (May 16, 1861) : "The King's 
Gift, Caprera" (July 18, 1861) : published at same time 
with news of her death, dated Florence, June 29th ; " A 
View across the Roman Campagna " (July 25, 1861). 



32 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

shall be forgiven one day; meanwhile, forgiven 
or unforgiven, it is satisfactory to one's own soul 
to have spoken the truth as one apprehends the 
truth." Alluding to the American feeling against 
Napoleon, she said : " Mr. F. hints that your peo- 
ple are not very Napoleonist. Neither am I, in 
any particular sense." She then called attention 
to the poem in the Independent, " Summing Up," 
in which she thus wrote of him : 

Napoleon — as strong as ten armies, 

Corrupt as seven devils — a fact 
You accede to, then seek where the harm is 

Drained off from the man to his act, 
And find ... a free nation! Suppose 

Some hell-brood in Eden's sweet greenery 
Convoked for creating ... a rose ! 

Would it suit the infernal machinery? 

The friend to whom she wrote this, in com- 
menting on it, well said : " This, in prose, is, if 
the Devil's workmen be doing God's work, who 
ought to hinder? Such was Mrs. Browning's 
Napoleonism." 

As we all know, a free and united Italy was 
finally fulfilled in Napoleon's formal recognition 
of Italian freedom and unity very soon after her 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 33 

peath. Would she could have lived to see this 
dream of her life ! 

While interested in her own success, Mrs. 
Browning never lost sight of the appreciation 
Americans were giving her countrymen. In her 
Essay on Carlyle she refers to the fact of his 
being generally read in America before he was 
truly recognized in his own land — a fact, she 
says, " replete with favorable promise for that 
great country, and indicative of a noble love of 
truth in it passing the love of dollars." 

Carlyle at this time was not only being read in 
America, but appreciating its practical help ; for, 
in his correspondence with Emerson, he expressed 
his thanks for the draft of fifty-one pounds en- 
closed in his letter — "a new, unexpected munifi- 
cence out of America — which is ever and anon 
dropping gifts upon me — to be received, as in- 
deed they partly are, like manna dropped out of 
the sky, the gift of unseen divinities!" Later, 
upon receiving from Emerson another draft of 
thirty-six pounds and odd shillings, he wrote him : 
" America, I think, is like an amiable teapot : you 
think it is all out long since, and lo, the valuable 



34 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

implement yields you another cup and another! 
Many thanks to you, who are the heart of Amer- 
ica to me." 

But Mrs. Browning's greatest joy was in the 
recognition America was giving her poet-hus- 
band. She felt that the forty-two pages given 
by the North American Review of April, 1848, 
to his Plays and Poems had well introduced the 
work to American readers, as had also Margaret 
Fuller's review of " Bells and Pomegranates " in 
the New York Tribune; indeed, this critic's short 
review of Paracelsus in the Boston Dial of April, 
1843, na -d appeared before any English notice 
saw the light. Years afterward, when the sale of 
his poems in England was almost infinitessimal, 
Mrs. Browning rejoiced in the fact that they were 
known and prized in the United States. " Ah, 
dear Sarianna," she wrote his sister in March, 
186 1, " I don't complain for myself of an unap- 
preciative public. / have no reason. But just for 
that reason I complain more about Robert — only 
he does not hear me complain. ... In Amer- 
ica he is a power, a writer, a poet — he is read, 
he lives in the hearts of the people." After re- 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 35 

ferring to Browning's readings in Boston, she 
says: " The English hunt lions too, but their 
lions are chiefly chosen among Lords." She then 
wonders if Robert had told her ("no, I fancy 
not," she hastens to say) that an English lady of 
rank had recently asked the American Minister 
whether Robert Browning was not an American. 
" Is it possible," replied the Minister, " that you 
ask me this ? Why, there is not so poor a village 
in the United States where they would not tell 
you that Robert Browning was an Englishman, 
and that they were very sorry he was not an 
American." To all this the proud wife adds: 
" Very pretty of the American Minister, was it 
not ? — and literally true, besides." 

This was all the more gratifying to Mrs. 
Browning because from the first she herself had 
felt full faith in him and his work. Soon after 
her correspondence with him began, she had 
written to an American friend that he was " full 
of great intentions ; the light of the future is on 
his forehead . . . he is a poet for posterity. 
I have a full faith in him as poet and prophet." 
What would she or her poet-husband have said 



36 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

could they have known of his first published 
book, " Pauline : a Fragment of a Confession, 
1833," as having been sold at the Daniel F. Ap- 
pleton auction sale in New York city in 1903 for 
one thousand and twenty-five dollars ; thus mak- 
ing it rank with Poe's " Tamerlane " as a record- 
price book. 

Lowell, in reviewing Lnria, as early as 1848, 
declared it to be if not the best of Browning's 
dramas certainly one of the " most striking in its 
clearness of purpose, the energetic rapidity of its 
movement, the harmony of its details, the natural 
attraction with which they all tend toward and 
at last end in the consummation, and in the sim- 
plicity and concentration of its tragic element." 
He had declared that his men and women were 
men and women, and not Mr. Browning mas- 
querading in different colored dominoes. 

Professor Hiram Corson of Cornell Univer- 
sity, in his Primer of English Verse, affirmed of 
The Ring and the Book that all things con- 
sidered it was the " greatest achievement of the 
century in blank verse ; " not the greatest in bulk 
(although it has double the number of Paradise 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 37 

Lost) but in the effective use of blank verse in 
the treatment of a great subject. He even de- 
clared that it was the greatest subject when 
viewed aright which had been treated in English 
poetry — " vastly greater in its bearings upon the 
higher education of man than that of the Paradise 
Lost." He felt that, while having a " most com- 
plex variety of character," it was the " most 
dramatic blank verse since the Elizabethan era." 
All this was his conclusion after having read the 
entire poem aloud to classes every year for sev- 
eral years. 

Another American critic, Edmund Clarence 
Stedman, though struck with wonder at the 
" changeful flow of verse " in this poem, and the 
" facility wherewith the poet records the specu- 
lation of his various characters," felt compelled 
to ask in his essay on Browning if it was " a 
stronghold of poetic art." As a whole, he con- 
fessed he could not admit that it was ; and yet 
the " thought, the vocabulary, the imagery, the 
wisdom lavished upon the story would equip a 
score of ordinary writers, and place them beyond 
danger of neglect." 



38 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

Much could be copied here of valuable criticism 
of this and other work of Browning given by 
some of America's best writers, such as William 
D. Howells, George E. Woodberry, Thomas 
Wentworth Higginson, Moncure D. Conway, 
George Willis Cooke, Charlotte Porter, and Helen 
A. Clarke. That they have been far-seeing and 
loyal to the poet argues to the credit of all. When 
Richard Garnett in his Life of Emerson tells us 
that Emerson included Browning in the list of 
new acquaintances he made in England, in 1872, 
would he could have told his opinion of him! 
But silence on the subject seems to be upper- 
most in all of Emerson's pathway. 

American poets, however, have not been idle 
in expression, as seen, for instance, in the follow- 
ing Sonnet of Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton : 

The Century was young — the month was May — 
The spacious East was kindled with a light 
That lent a sudden glory to the night, 

And a new star began its upward way 

Toward the high splendor of the perfect day. 
With pure white flame, inexorably bright, 
It reached the souls of men — no stain so slight 

As to escape its all-revealing ray. 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 39 

When countless voices cried "The Star has set!" 
And through the lands there surged a sea of pain, 
Was it Death's triumph — victory of Woe? 
Nay! There are lights the sky may not forget; 
When suns, and moons, and souls shall rise again, 
In the New Life's wide East that star shall glow. 

Neither have American artists failed to re- 
member the work of either Mr. or Mrs. Brown- 
ing. Ross Turner has added to his illumination 
of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat and other master- 
pieces that of the Portuguese Sonnets. It was a 
joy indeed to see in a foremost place among the 
literary treasures of the Browning Palace in 
Venice, as the artist's gift to the poet-husband, 
the illustrated American work of Ipsen, as seen 
in the Sonnets. 

Browning himself ever showed a recognition of 
personal appreciation of his work in America. 
It was a pleasure to him to procure for the 
British Museum, as one of the curiosities of 
literature, the first complete edition of his works 
as reprinted in the Official Guide of the Chicago 
& Alton Railroad in monthly issues from 1872- 
1874. He flattered himself that in this Railway 



4o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

Time Table he came near to the heart of the 
people. He revealed a still further recognition 
when, on the death of Levi Lincoln Thaxter, he 
responded to his son's request for an inscription 
for the tombstone with the following lines : 

Thou whom these eyes saw never ! Say, friends true, 
Who say my soul, helped onward by my song, 
Though all unwittingly, has helped thee too? 
I gave of but the little that I knew; 
How were the gift requited, while along 
Life's path I pace, could'st thou make weakness strong! 
Help me with knowledge — for Life's old — Death's new! 
(R. B. to L L. T., April, 1885.) 

A few years before, Mrs. Thaxter had written 
the poet that he was to Levi " the great enthu- 
siasm of his life." Together they had enjoyed 
reading his books. " I don't think you can have 
any conception," she wrote her friend E. C. 
Hoxie, " what an infinite source of pleasure and 
consolation under all trials Browning's Men and 
Women is to me. 

" There is something satisfactory to every mood 
of the human mind in that book. Many of the 
shorter pieces I know by heart, and you would 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 41 

laugh to hear the children, who catch everything 
from me, talking about 

" The patching house-leek's head of blossom wink 

Through the chinks ..." 

Later she is asking this same friend if she has 
heard the " wise thrush " of Browning — 

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over 
Lest you should think he never could recapture 
The first fine careless rapture! 

Doubtless she felt with Stedman and many 
others that, though having in mind Shakespeare 
and Shelley, these three lines were, nevertheless, 
the finest ever written touching the song of a 
bird. 

" If you don't hear him," says Mrs. Thaxter, 
" perhaps you'll see the man who wrote about 
him, which will, perhaps, be better." She de- 
clared he was one with all his " wits about him, 
duly alive and aware. . . . What vitality in 
all his words, what splendid power ! " After all, 
she felt there was no one " quite so satisfying to 
the human mind, and no one who wearied of his 
worthiest speech any more than of Shakespeare." 



42 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

Years later, in 1890, in writing to her friend 
Bradford Torrey of birds being that winter " the 
horrors of women's headgear," she refers to 
Browning's having a " shot at these senseless 
women in Asolando, his last book." 

Browning's personal tribute to Levi Thaxter 
recalls one bestowed a few years before on an- 
other American, a daughter of his friend Mrs. 
Bronson — as seen in a little book, which had 
among other contributions of poet and artist the 
following lines Longfellow had written : 

She who comes to me and pleadeth 
In the lovely name of Edith 

Will not fail of what was wanted. 
Edith means the " Blessed." Therefore 
All that she may wish or care for 

Will, when best for her, be granted ! 

To ten lines from his Epilogue of Dramatic 
Idyls beginning " Touch him ne'er so lightly into 
song he broke," etc., Browning added : 

Thus I wrote in London, musing on my betters, 
Poets dead and gone; and lo, the critics cried, 

" Out on such a boast ! " as if I dreamed that fetters 
Binding Dante, bind up — me ! as if true pride 

Were not also humble ! 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 43 

So I smiled and sighed, 
As I oped your book in Venice this bright morning, 

Sweet new friend of mine ! and felt the clay or sand — 
Whatso'er my soil be — break — for praise or scorning — 
Out in grateful fancies — weeds; but weeds expand 
Almost into flowers, held by such a kindly band ! 
October 14, 1880. (The Century Magazine, Vol. 25.) 

This facility for impromptu expression so in- 
terested his American friend Mrs. Clara J. 
Bloomfield-Moore that once in opening before 
him a letter from George Bancroft, the historian, 
in which he had mentioned the approach of his 
eighty-seventh birthday, she proposed that he 
write something for her to cable. Almost as 
quick as thought he wrote : 

Bancroft, the message-bearing wire, 

Which flashes my all-hail today, 
Moves slowlier than the heart's desire 

That what hand pens, tongue's self might say. 

(May Lippincott, 1890.) 

This facility of expression, also shown in im- 
promptus to others, has not been wanting in the 
American friends. Some instances may not be 
out of place here. In a copy of Browning Bliss 



44 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

Carman wrote sixteen four-line verses ending 
thus: 

Since first I sought you, found you, and bought you, 
Hugged you, and brought you home from Cornhill, 

While some upbraid you, and some parade you, 
Nine years have made you my master still. 

In a Christmas gift of 1882 by my side, "Aga- 
memnon La Saissaz and Dramatic Idyls/' is this 
impromptu of its giver, B. P. Shillaber (Mrs. 
Partington) : 

A merry Christmas I send with this, 
Though it seems absurdity crowning 

To wish for cachinatory bliss 
Over the works of Browning. 

Later, when presenting me Parleyings with 
Certain People (1887), he wrote: 

R. Browning, Browning, why your time exhaust 

By these mysterious workings of your fancy, 
Conjuring phantoms like another Faust, 

Respect demanding for your necromancy? 
Like some rare mechanism, genius-fraught, 

We gaze, admire, yet fail we to command them; 
Your ways show sweet perplexities of thought 

That fascinate, though we can't understand them ! 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 45 

In a volume of selected poems of Mrs. Brown- 
ing, which followed this, the genial, loving soul 
wrote : 

Contrite for my preceding gift 

Of Rob., with occult mysteries rife, 
I here the cloud reproachful lift 
By these sweet poems of his wife. 

It is interesting to notice that Mrs. Brown- 
ing's loyalty to the Americans made her sensi- 
tive to criticism of them. When Dickens' 
America appeared she declared to Mrs. Martin 
(1843) tnat ^ sne were an American it would 
make her " rabid," and " certain of the free citi- 
zens are furious, I understand, while others 
1 speak peace and ensue it.' " She said she ad- 
mired Mr. Dickens as " an imaginative writer," 
and she " loved the Americans ; " but she couldn't 
possibly " admire or love that book " — and yet 
she herself dared criticise American affairs. She 
criticised authors, even James Russell Lowell 
(who had written her several letters " all very 
kind "), declaring that though he had a " refined 
fancy," and was " graceful for an American 
critic," yet he was " not deep enough in his pre- 



46 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

sentation of the early dramatists." When in that 
same year (1845) Mrs. Sigourney sent her her 
Scenes in My Native Land she wrote the same 
friend (Mr. Browning) that, peeping between 
the uncut leaves, she read of the " poet Hillhouse 
of sublime spirit and Miltonic energy standing 
in the temple of Fame as if it were built on pur- 
pose for him." " I suppose," she concludes, " he 
is like most of the American poets, who are 
shadows of the true — as flat as a shadow, as 
colorless as a shadow, as lifeless and as transi- 
tory." Even when praising Poe to Mr. Brown- 
ing (1846) she declared that Politian would make 
him laugh, as the Raven had made her laugh — 
though with something in it which accounts for 
the hold it took upon the people such as Mr. N. 
P. Willis and his peers." She had to acknowl- 
edge, however, that there was " poetry in the 
man seen between the great gaps of bathos." 
Around this charitable conclusion might have 
lingered the glowing testimony Poe gave her in 
the Evening Mirror some two years before (Oc- 
tober, 1844), when he said she "was worth a 
dozen of Tennyson and six of Motherwell — 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 4 7 

equal perhaps in original genius to Keats and 
Shelley." This was followed in the Mirror of 
Dec. 7, 1844, by another unmistakable sentence 
on the poet : " We do not believe there is a 
poetical soul embodied in this world that, as a 
center of thought, sees further out towards 
the periphery permitted to angels than Miss 
Barrett." 

Poe also reviewed her in the first two numbers 
of the Broadway Journal of 1845. " She has 
surpassed all her poetical contemporaries of 
either sex (with a single exception) that excep- 
tion being Tennyson." 

While Mrs. Browning is interested in the work 
of the American men she has an eye for what 
the women are doing. In 1854, she is wondering 
if Miss Mitford had seen Julia Ward Howe's 
Passion Flowers, just out. " They were sent 
me by an American friend," she writes, " but 
were intercepted en route, so that I have not set 
eyes on them yet, but one or two persons not 
particularly reliable as critics have praised them 
to me." She then goes on to tell that though she 
is " the wife of the deaf and dumb philanthro- 



48 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

pist " (that was the fact as it reached her) " she 
is herself neither deaf nor dumb (very much the 
contrary) ; but, as she understood, a handsome 
woman and brilliant in society." A few weeks 
later, having read the poems, she declared to 
this same friend : " Some of them are good — 
many of the thoughts striking, and all of a cer- 
tain elevation. Of poetry, however, strictly 
speaking, there is not much ; and there is a large 
proportion of conventional stuff in the volume. 
. . . Of the ordinary impotencies and pretti- 
nesses of female poets she does not partake, but 
she can't take rank with poets in the good mean- 
ing of the word, I think, so as to stand without 
leaning. Also there is some bad taste and af- 
fectations in the dressing of her personality." 
But with all this criticism she finds space to de- 
clare that she " must be a clever woman." 
(Letters, Vol. II.) Thus to her sharpest criti- 
cism ever hovers a loving charity. Even when 
sending off to the Americans her thirty-six stanza 
poem, The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point, 
she felt it might be " too ferocious " for them to 
publish. But " they asked for a poem and they 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 49 

shall have it," she declared. She even wrote 
Miss Mitford that nobody would want to print it 
because she " could not help making it bitter." 
If they did print it she should think them " more 
boldly in earnest " than she fancied them. That 
the Americans did realize its value for them in 
that period of their history is seen in its appear- 
ance in The Liberty Bell, a publication issued 
and for sale by the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazar 
of 1848. 

From that time on Mrs. Browning watched 
even more closely the slavery question in the 
United States. As early as 1853 she is discuss- 
ing the matter with Mrs. Jameson : " A difficult 
question — yes ! All virtue is difficult. England 
found it difficult, France found it difficult. But we 
did not make ourselves an armchair for our sins. 
As for America, I honor America in much ; but 
I would not be an American for the world while 
she wears that shameful scar upon her brow." 
She declares that the address of the new Presi- 
dent, General Franklin Pierce, " exasperated " 
her. " Observe, I am an abolitionist," she con- 
tinues, " not to the fanatical degree, because I 



50 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

hold that compensation should be given by the 
North to the South, as in England. The States 
should unite in buying off this national disgrace." 
She wrote all this in the idea that Mrs. Jameson 
thought a woman had no business with questions 
like slavery. " Then she had better use a pen no 
more/' she said. " She had better subside into 
slavery and concubinage herself, I think, as in 
the times of old, shut herself up with the Penel- 
opes in the women's apartment, and take no 
rank among thinkers and speakers. Certainly 
you are not in earnest in these things." This ex- 
pression of her feeling reminded her that the 
" Americans were very kind and earnest," and 
she liked them " all the better for their warm 
feeling " towards Mrs. Jameson. 

When the Civil War was approaching she 
wrote Mrs. Martin from Rome (December, i860) 
that " the crisis had come earlier than anyone 
expected. It is a crisis ; and if the North accepts 
such a compromise as has been proposed the 
nation perishes morally, which would be sadder 
than the mere dissolution of States however sad. 
It is the difference between the death of the soul 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 51 

and of the body." She felt there " might and 
ought to be a pecuniary compromise; but a com- 
promise of principle would be fatal." She was 
confident that in their then Italian affairs Italy 
could learn from America that " a certain degree 
of centralization (not carried too far) was neces- 
sary to a strong and vital government." Lin- 
coln's Inaugural Address, with the exception of 
certain expressions which did strike her as a 
superfluity of the official form, she " admired." It 
seemed to her " direct and resolute, simple, and 
intense." (The superfluity was Mr. Lincoln's 
voluntary offer to return fugitive slaves.) In 
another letter to this same American friend she 
alludes to a speech she had read in an American 
paper. " What affected me most," she wrote, 
" was not the eloquence — no, but the rare union 
of largeness and tolerance with fidelity to special 
truth. In our age faith and charity are found, 
but they are found apart. We tolerate every- 
body, because we doubt everything; or else we 
tolerate nobody because we believe something." 
During the early part of the war she continued 
to fear the North would compromise; that they 



52 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

were not " heroically strong on their legs on the 
moral question. I fear it much," she repeated. 
" If they can but hold up it will be noble. . . . 
Not that I despair of America," she wrote Miss 
Blagden ; " God forbid." She could not agree 
with those who were willing to let the South go. 
She believed that " the unity of the States should 
be asserted with a strong hand and the South 
forced to pay taxes and submit to law." If the 
North would only " be faithful to its conscience," 
there would be " an increase of greatness after a 
few years, even though it may rain blood betwixt 
then and now." At this same time she repeated 
to another friend (Miss Haworth) her anxiety 
about the United States, " fearing a compromise " 
in the North. " All other dangers," she said, 
were " comparatively null." In an article on 
Italy and America, published in the New York 
Independent of March 21, 1861, she declared 
again that if the North stood fast on the moral 
ground no glory would be like their glory. " You 
are compassed by a great cloud of witnesses," 
she wrote, " and can afford to risk anything ex- 
cept conscience." She further declared that she 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 53 

honored Republicanism everywhere as an expres- 
sion of the people; but it seemed to her that a 
theoretical attachment to any form of govern- 
ment whatever was " simply pedantry, as if one 
should insist upon everybody's wearing one kind 
of hat, or adopting one attitude." She believed 
that a genuine government was " simply the at- 
titude of that special people " ; that what was 
required for every man (or state) was " life, 
health, muscular freedom to choose his own at- 
titude. Let us be for Democracy," she urged, 
" and leave the rest. Who cares for the figure 
at the helm, as long as the people's wind is in the 
sails? I care little. Only I do care that the 
Democracy should have power — that each man 
should have the inheritance of a man, and the 
right of voting where he is taxed." This, she 
affirmed, was her " creed." In this same article 
she said nothing would " destroy the Republic 
but what corrupted its conscience and disturbed 
its fame — for the stain upon the honor must 
come off upon the flag." Her look at the prac- 
tical side of the matter led her to ask : " Ought 
not the North, for instance, to propose a pecuni- 



54 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

ary compromise, taxing itself for compensation 
to the South?" 

Among the last things she read, and found 
pleasure in discussing with an American friend, 
were Motley's letters on the American Crisis. 
Referring to what foreign nations were saying, 
she said : " Why do you heed what others say ? 
You are strong and can do without sympathy; 
and when you have triumphed your glory will be 
the greater." 

That Mrs. Browning could feel this deep in- 
terest in a far-off nation while so fully laboring 
for the progress of her loved and suffering Italy, 
reveals the magnitude of her intelligence and 
sympathies. Her inclination was ever to the de- 
velopment of the individual. As early as 1848 
she wrote Miss Mitford that " Liberty and civili- 
zation when married together lawfully rather 
evolve individuality than tend to generalization ; " 
and a few days later she wrote John Kenyon, 
" Nothing can be more hateful to me than this 
communist idea of quenching individualities in 
the mass. As if the hope of the world did not 
always consist in the eliciting of the individual 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 55 

man from the background of the masses in the 
evolvement of individual gains, virtue, mag- 
nanimity." 

One could say of this what Stedman said of 
Aurora Leigh, " that an audacious, speculative 
freedom pervades it which smacks of the New 
World rather than the Old." 

Though Mr. Browning does not appear to say 
as much on affairs in the United States as his 
wife, when he does speak he is strong and help- 
ful ; as, for instance, when he declared in a letter 
to an American, dated September 11, 1861 : "I 
have lost the explanation of American affairs, 
but I assure you of my belief in the justice and 
my confidence in the triumph of the great cause. 
For the righteousness of the principle I want no 
information. God prosper it and its defenders." 
(Browning Society Papers, Part XII.) 

The month before, August, 1861, upon hear- 
ing of the disaster at Bull's Run, he had written 
William W. Story that, so far as he knew any- 
thing about it from having glanced at a single 
newspaper, he felt that the good cause had suf- 
fered, and that " we all suffer with it." . . . 



56 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

He looked, however, to success in the end " with 
every confidence." " You must and will do 
better, and best, another time," he continues, 
" and meanwhile, the fewer big words on all sides 
in any sense, the better!" (James' Life of 
Story.) Later, in November, in referring again 
to the American news, he declares that he never 
heard a " word for the South even from those 
who think the North underestimated its strength, 
and despair of a better issue than separation." 
" We say fight it out to the last ; but for English 
lookers-on who abjure heroics, to say that would 
be saying: Do yourselves as much harm as you 
can." 

Years before the Civil War, Powers' Greek 
Slave had stirred the soul of Mrs. Browning in 
these closing words of a Sonnet: 

Pierce to the centre 
Art's fiery finger, and break up ere long 

The serfdom of this world. Appeal, fair stone 
From God's pure heights of beauty against man's wrong ! 

Catch up in thy divine face, not alone 
East griefs but west, and strike and shame the strong 

By thunders of white silence overthrown. 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 57 

Thus in looking at the art of America the eye 
and heart of the poet-woman paused in the in- 
terests of freedom. She even dared to express 
her belief to Bayard Taylor, upon meeting him 
in London in 1851, that a Republican form of 
government was unfavorable to the development 
of the fine arts. To this opinion Mr. Taylor dis- 
sented " as modestly as possible," and soon had 
a powerful ally in Mr. Browning, who declared 
that no artist had ever before been honored with 
a more splendid commission than the state of 
Virginia had given to Thomas Crawford for a 
monument in Richmond. A general historical 
discussion followed, Mr. and Mrs. Browning 
taking different views. " It was good-humoredly 
closed at last," said Mr. Taylor in his At Home 
and Abroad, " and I thought both of them seemed 
to enjoy it. There is no fear that two such fine 
intellects will rust ; they will keep each other 
bright through the delight of the encounter." 

Several years later (in 1855), the Brownings 
were enjoying art talks with another American, 
Mr. James Russell Lowell. It was in one of the 
art galleries of Paris, where Mr. Lowell was 



58 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

particularly interested, as he wrote Professor 
Charles Eliot Norton, in Vandyke's portrait of 
Lady Venetia Digby. He said he " was glad to 
show Mrs. Browning the likeness of a woman 
who had inspired so noble and enduring a love 
in so remarkable a man as Sir Kenelm." 

But other manifestations than those of the fine 
arts were claiming the Brownings' attention, and 
arousing animated but kindly discussions with 
their friends. Mrs. Browning was " hearing," 
and " would hear much " of the " rapping spirits." 
She is asking Miss Blagden (winter of 1852-3) 
if her American friends ever wrote to her about 
them, as she had heard that at least 15,000 Ameri- 
cans " of all classes and society were mediums, as 
the term is. . . . Most curious, these phenomena," 
she concludes. After referring to the matter in a 
letter to Miss Mitford, she somewhat apologizes 
for herself by saying : " You know I am rather 
a visionary, and inclined to knock round at all 
the doors of the present world to try to get out, 
so that I listen with interest to every goblin story 
of the kind, and indeed I hear enough of them 
just now." 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 59 

Any harsh criticism of this mental attitude of 
Mrs. Browning always brings to my mind what 
she wrote to Miss Haworth : " Investigation is 
all I desire. It is not the communications that 
impress me, but the probability of such. I look 
at the movement." 

It was an American, our own Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, who seemed to understand Mrs. Brown- 
ing on this subject, as she " opened out to her 
very fully " in the Florentine home. The " char- 
acter of Mrs. Stowe's intellect " pleased her ; she 
was " devout, yet brave in the outlook for truth, 
considering not whether a thing be sound, but 
whether it be true." She was impressed by what 
she wrote her of hearing from her drowned boy, 
" without any seeking on her part," declaring that 
she " spoke very calmly about it, with no dogma- 
tism, but with the strongest disposition to receive 
the facts of the subject with all their bearings 
and at whatever loss of orthodoxy or sacrifice of 
reputation for common sense." The appearance 
of Uncle Tom's Cabin some years before had in- 
terested her. " No woman ever had such a suc- 
cess," she wrote Miss Mitford (1853), ''such a 



6o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

fame no man ever had in a single book. For my 
own part, I rejoice greatly in it. It is an indi- 
vidual glory full of healthy influence and bene- 
diction to the world." A month later she wrote 
Mrs. Jameson that she must read the book. " It 
is quite a sign of the times, and has otherwise, 
and intrinsically, considerable power. For my- 
self, I rejoice in the success both as a woman and 
a human being." 

Upon meeting Mrs. Stowe for the first time, 
several years later, she confessed she liked her 
better than she thought she should. " I find more 
refinement in the voice and manner, no rampant 
Americanism. Very simple and gentle ; unde- 
sirous of shining or poser-ing, so it seems to me, 
. . She is nice-looking, too ; there is something 
strong, copious, and characteristic in her dusky, 
wavy hair. For the rest, the brow has not very 
large capacity, and the mouth wants something, 
both in frankness and sensitiveness I should say. 
But what can one see in a morning visit ? I must 
wait for another opportunity. . . . Her books 
are not so much to me, I confess, as the fact is 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 61 

that she above all women (yes, and men of the 
age) has moved the world — and for good." 

Years afterwards Mrs. Stowe expressed her 
feeling for Mrs. Browning's personality when 
she wrote the Duchess of Argyle (July 31, 1883) 
that none of her poems could express what she 
was — so grand, so comprehending, so strong, 
with such inspired sight ; " she said she " stood 
by Italy through its crisis. Her heart was with 
all good through the world." 

Others besides Mrs. Stowe were more or less 
interested in Mrs. Browning's thought concern- 
ing spiritual manifestations. The Hawthornes, 
then living (1858) in the Montaiito Villa just 
outside the walls of Florence, had their attention 
particularly called to it through a certain power 
possessed by a governess in their employ which 
Mrs. Browning had noticed. Mrs. Hawthorne, 
however, in writing to her sister, Elizabeth Pea- 
body, of the conversations she was having with 
the Brownings on the subject, confessed that she 
" kept aloof in mind " in such things, because 
Mr. Hawthorne had " such a repugnance to the 
whole thing." She believed that Mrs. Brown- 



62 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

ing was " a spiritualist," while Mr. Browning 
" opposed and protested with all his might," but 
was " ready to be convinced." She recalls her 
attempt in talking of spirit-hands, " to stem his 
flow of eager, funny talk with her slender voice; 
but, like an arrowy river, he rushed and foamed 
and leaped over her slight tones, and she could 
not succeed in explaining how she knew they 
were spirit-hands." Though not particularly in 
sympathy with her in this matter, Mrs. Hawthorne 
found her " wonderfully interesting — the most 
delicate sheath for a soul " she ever saw. " You 
would be infinitely charmed," she wrote her sister, 
" and with Mr. Browning as well. The latter 
is very mobile, and flings himself about just as he 
flings his thoughts on paper, while his wife is still 
and contemplative. Love, evidently, has saved 
her life." The following year she refers to de- 
lightful visits with them, and especially to a 
horseback ride she enjoyed with him. In her 
Diary she tells that while stopping to talk with a 
friend one day he " darted upon them across the 
Piazza glowing with cordiality." But the ex- 
quisite sympathy of Mrs. Browning, when Una, 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 6 3 

the beloved first-born, was ill with Roman fever, 
as told us by her daughter Rose in her Memories, 
was particularly precious to her. " Even dear 
Mrs. Browning.," she says, " who almost never 
goes upstairs, came the moment she heard. She 
was like an angel. I saw her but a moment, but 
the clasp of her hand was electric, and her voice 
permeated my heart." " Fortunate the eyes that 
see her," she once exclaimed, " and the ears that 
hear her." In a letter, now for the first time 
published, written to a member of the household 
at that time — xA.pril, 1859 — Mrs. Browning re- 
veals her anxiety and love : 

How I thank you for your little note — and the relief 
it gives me. May God bless you all and bless and 
keep that dear, sweet Una, whose lovely face as I saw it 
last has been since so painful to me to think of. You 
are very good, very comprehending — but a touch of 
common human sympathy is worth nothing at such a 
moment to poor Mrs. Hawthorne. If it is, she must be 
very large-hearted indeed. I hope and trust that the 
medical judgment will prove to be quite wrong. The 
youth and the vitality of the patient will go far and 
stand long against disease. 

Let me subscribe myself 

Affectionately yours, 
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 



64 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

She then adds in a postscript: 

You need not take the trouble of sending — we will 
send. 

In his English Notes Hawthorne has left one 
of the finest pictures literature has revealed of 
Mrs. Browning. It was at a breakfast at Monc- 
ton Milnes, in 1856, when the shy, sensitive man 
was assigned to lead her to the breakfast-room, 
" a small, delicate woman, with ringlets of dark 
hair, a pleasant, intelligent, and sensitive face," 
looking " youthful and comely," and " very gentle 
and ladylike." In a " low, agreeable voice," she 
conversed on various subjects. She said spirit- 
ualism interested her much, although Mr. Brown- 
ing " utterly rejected the subject, and would not 
believe even in the outward manifestations of 
which there was such overwhelming evidence." 
They discussed the theory of Delia Bacon con- 
cerning Shakespeare, " greatly to the horror " of 
Mrs. Browning. " On the whole," Hawthorne 
confesses, " I like her the better for loving the 
man Shakespeare with a personal love." They 
talked of Margaret Fuller, of William Wetmore 
Story ; indeed, they talked " a good deal " during 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 65 

breakfast, for, he declares, she was " of that 
quickly appreciative and responsive order of 
woman with whom I can talk more freely than 
with any man ; and she has, besides, her own 
originality wherewith to help on conversation, 
though I should say not of a loquacious ten- 
dency. ... I like her much." 

After the breakfast he had a talk with Mr. 
Browning — " handsome, with brown hair, very 
simple and agreeable in manner, gently impulsive, 
talking as if his heart were uppermost. He 
spoke of his pleasure in meeting me and his 
appreciation of my books." Referring to the 
fact that he mentioned the Blithedale Romance as 
the one he admired most, he wondered why. " I 
hope," he concludes, " I showed as much pleasure 
at his praise as he did at mine, for I was glad to 
see how pleasantly it moved him." 

Hawthorne must have known of Browning's 
appreciation of his work, for some time before 
(1851) Mr. Fields had written him from Paris 
that Browning had said he was " the finest genius 
that had appeared in English literature for many 
years." 



66 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

Mary Anderson felt the frank, charming per- 
sonality of Browning, when meeting him at a 
party where he took her out to dinner, she says — 
in her Memoirs — there was " a kind of friendly 
chattiness in his conversation," which, however, 
seemed to her " to be more agreeable than dis- 
tinguished." She confessed she should have 
named any of the men at table sooner than 
he as the author of Rabbi Ben Ezra and Pippa 
Passes. Her first impression was that he re- 
sembled an " old-school Southern country gentle- 
man " more than her ideal of England's mystic 
poet. He seemed always at his best, she 
thought, in the studio of some artist. The 
poet was evidently pleased with " our Mary," for 
he told a friend afterwards that he found her 
" charming," a very " sensible young woman." 

Another American, Edith Abell the gifted 
musician, in recalling pleasant hours spent with 
the poet in 1889- 1890, also testifies to the genial, 
simple bearing he ever manifested towards her. 
He was the same " cordial, genial, happy gentle- 
man — the great poet being always kept in the 
background." She says he was always pleased 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 67 

to read his poems aloud, and he also knew how 
to say the nice thing. " I will read to you, and in 
return you shall sing to me." Among the little 
incidents of her personal acquaintance with him 
she recalls his unaffected, and even childlike de- 
light, when, upon making her guess his age, she 
candidly and honestly named some fifteen years 
less than he really was. This caused him to 
challenge her to read without a magnifying glass 
what he would write with his naked eye — for 
he did not use glasses. As a result she now owns 
a precious card he gave her on which, with his 
autograph, he wrote a verse of four lines which 
her thumb-nail could easily cover, and which 
few have strong sight enough to read without 
glasses. 

The Hon. Andrew D. White of Cornell Uni- 
versity in his diplomatic Reminiscences testifies 
to the conversational qualities of Browning. This 
was revealed to him under somewhat novel cir- 
cumstances. He was in London, in 1879, on 
his way to take up his duties of Minister to Ger- 
many as successor to Bayard Taylor. One even- 
ing at the home of Alma Tadema he met Robert 



68 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

Browning. On their departure, as Mr. Brown- 
ing's carriage did not arrive, he offered to take 
him home in his; but hardly had they started 
when they found themselves in a dense fog. It 
was soon evident that the driver had lost his 
way. " As he wandered about for perhaps an 
hour," says Mr. White, " hoping to find some in- 
dication of it, Browning's conversation was very 
agreeable. It ran at first on current questions, 
then on travel, and finally on art — all very 
simply and naturally, without a trace of posing 
or paradox. Remembering the obscurity of his 
verse I was surprised at the lucidity of his talk. 
But at last both of us becoming somewhat 
anxious we called a halt, and questioned the 
driver, who confessed that he had no idea where 
he was. As good or ill luck would have it there 
just then emerged from the fog an empty hansom 
cab, and, finding that its driver knew more than 
ours, I engaged him as a pilot first to Browning's 
house, and then to my own." 

Both Mr. and Mrs. Browning showed a fa- 
miliarity with the works of American authors, 
each having their favorites. As early as 1853 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 69 

Mrs. Browning wrote Miss Mitford (so Miss 
Mitford wrote Mr. Fields) that she preferred 
Lowell and Emerson. She found in some 
English books of Henry Ward Beecher's writ- 
ings " fine and thrilling things." She declared 
they would " help her to live," and perhaps they 
would " help her to sufTer." Mr. Browning il- 
lustrated this knowledge even more practically 
when, upon meeting Bayard Taylor at one time, 
he welcomed him with " From the Desert I Come 
to Thee." He not only knew it by heart, but 
said it w T as the finest thing of the kind he ever 
read ; at which the poet, in writing the fact to his 
New York friends, the Stoddards, exclaimed : 
"Hold me!" 

This friendly interest in American literature 
doubtless led Una Hawthorne, in taking up the 
work her mother left of looking over the Haw- 
thorne manuscripts, to ask Mr. Browning's as- 
sistance in deciphering Septimius ere it was pub- 
lished. But there was another, a more tender, 
link to the poet. He had known her and her 
sister Rose in their sorrow ; for he had been one 
of the friends who had joined the American 



70 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

friends, Moncure D. Conway, William Henry 
Channing, and Russell Sturgis, as they stood by 
the open grave of her mother in Kensal Green 
Cemetery that March day of 1871. She could 
never forget it. 

American scenery, as well as American litera- 
ture, was also noted by the Brownings. In her 
prose essay on the Poets Mrs. Browning refers 
to Niagara Falls in treating of God in nature 
and poetry. " Nature is where God is. Poetry 
is where God is. Can you go up or down or 
around and not find Him? In the loudest hum 
of your machinery, in the densest volume of your 
steam, in the foulest street of your city — there, 
as surely as in the Brocken pine woods and the 
watery thunders of Niagara — there as surely 
as He is above all lie Nature and Poetry in full 
life. Speak and they will answer." Years be- 
fore, in her Essay on Mind, she had referred to 
Niagara. " Behold afar, the playmate of the 
storm " — " himself the savage of his native 
woods " ; and, again, " Wild Niagara lifts his 
awful form." And yet she never saw the glory, 
for she nor her husband never came to America. 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 71 

In later years Mr. Browning through " innum- 
erable requests for autographs " (with which, 
Mrs. Bronson tells us, he " was amused, but never 
impatient,") heard particularly of the " Western 
States and far California." A more lasting testi- 
mony, however, was the dedication to him of a 
pyramidal pile of rocks, which Joaquin Miller 
erected on the summit of a hill in his California 
home. 

Local expressions of Americans were noted by 
the Brownings; as, when settled in some new 
quarters for a season, Mrs. Browning wrote Miss 
Blagden : " Now we are fixed, as our American 
friends would say." 

Their friendly intercourse with Americans is 
noticeable through all their Florentine life. " The 
visits we receive from delightful and cordial per- 
sons of that country have been most gratifying 
to us," wrote Mrs. Browning. Settled in Casa 
Guidi, they saw even " more Americans than 
English," she wrote Miss Mitford in 1848. She 
it was to whom she also told of her happy married 
life. " After more than twenty months of mar- 
riage we are happier than ever — I may say we." 



72 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

She felt she could never make her friend under- 
stand what her husband was to her — " the 
noblest and perfectest of human beings." After 
" an absolute soul-to-soul intercourse and union," 
she had to " look higher still for her first 
ideal." She also wrote of her joy to Mrs. 
Jameson, not only because she was the first to 
know their happiness, but that she might " set 
down in her photography of the possibility of 
book-making creatures living happy together." 
She confessed she was " happier and happier 
month after month." She had to admit, how- 
ever, that her husband was " an exceptional 
human being and that it wouldn't be just to 
measure another by him." (Letters.) This ex- 
ceptional husband had also his confession to 
make to Mrs. Jameson of his exceptional wife, 
when he wrote of her " entirely angel nature, as 
divine a heart as God ever made. I know more 
of her every day; I who thought I knew some- 
thing of her five years ago." 

In this restful, growing life American liter- 
arians were privileged to enter. In 1847, Mrs. 
Browning refers to George Stillman Hillard as 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 73 

" an American critic who reviewed her in (the 
old) world and so came to view her in the new; 
a very intelligent man of a good noble spirit." 
Her friend Kenyon, who was also fond of the 
Americans, was appreciative of this one, calling 
him at one time the " best prepared " young for- 
eigner he had ever met who had come to see 
Europe. James T. Fields tells, in his Yesterday 
with Authors, that at Kenyon's dinner table he 
heard him say, in the presence of Mrs. Jameson, 
Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, Walter Savage Landor, 
Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and the Proctors, that 
one of the best talkers on any subject that might 
be started was the author of Six Months in Italy. 
We are all familiar with the picture of the Brown- 
ings Mr. Hillard has given in this book; that a 
" happier home and a more perfect union than 
theirs " it was not easy to imagine ; that Brown- 
ing's poetry was " subtle, passionate, and pro- 
found," but he himself was " simple, natural, and 
playful " ; while Mrs. Browning was a " soul of 
fire enclosed in a shell of pearl; nor," he added, 
was she " more remarkable for genius and learn- 
ing than for sweetness of temper, tenderness of 



74 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

heart, depth of feeling, and purity of spirit. . . 
A union so complete as theirs — in which the 
mind has nothing to crave nor the heart to sigh 
for — is cordial to behold and soothing to re- 
member." He confessed (and this was in 1854) 
that the names of these two poets were even more 
familiar in America than in England, and that 
their poetry was probably more read and better 
understood there than among their own country- 
men." This was partially due to their Boston 
publisher, James T. Fields, who became a per- 
sonal friend. In November, 1849, ne ^ s writing 
Miss Mitford that he was just then " superin- 
tending the republication of the complete Poems 
of Robert Browning, the first American reprint 
to be issued by their house in a few weeks." 
Upon hearing this Miss Mitford replied that Mrs. 
Browning " would be enchanted at this honor 
done her husband. It is most creditable to 
America that they think more of our thoughtful 
poets than the English do themselves." The 
early recognition the United States had given 
her own work Miss Mitford never forgot. It led 
her to say : " It takes ten years to make a literary 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 75 

reputation in England, but America is wiser and 
bolder and dares say at once, ' This is fine.' I 
love America and the Americans," she once en- 
thusiastically exclaimed. Two years after writ- 
ing of the publication of Robert Browning's 
Poems Mr. Fields is writing Miss Mitford of his 
intention to republish a new edition of Mrs. 
Browning; but another house having claimed 
the right, the project was abandoned. In the 
" charming " visit he paid them in 1852 he re- 
gretted that he could not have seen more of 
them. But he found Mrs. Browning in better 
health than he expected and hoped she would 
live " to write many more great poems." That 
the visit was mutually enjoyable is seen by Miss 
Mitford's writing to Mr. Fields that " Mrs. 
Browning was delighted with your visit." 

Among other Americans to the Browning 
home, who " took coffee " with them once or 
twice a week, was Mr. Ware, author of Letters 
from Palmyra — "a delightful, earnest, simple 
person." The different American ministers and 
their wives who called in passing through the 
city were welcomed. Among these were Gen- 



7o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

eral Watson Webb of the Court of Vienna, 
" with an air of moral as well as military com- 
mand on his brow and eyes " ; Honorable George 
Marsh of the Court of Constantinople, and the 
Honorable William B. Kinney, who became a 
resident of Florence after his mission to Sar- 
dinia. His wife Elizabeth C. Kinney (mother 
of Edmund Clarence Stedman), in Scribner's 
magazine for December, 1870, gives pleasant 
reminiscences of their friendship. She tells of 
spending with the " great Elizabeth, Queen of 
Poetry, and Robert, the mighty, crowned also 
in his own peculiar sphere of poesy," a beautiful 
June day at Pratolino. They went in an open 
carriage, with a man servant to carry the 
luncheon. Having eaten this on a rustic table in 
the grove they all went to the brow of the hill to 
see the view. The silence which encompassed 
them was only broken by a remark of Mrs. 
Browning : " How it speaks to us ! " 

An ever-precious memory to George William 
Curtis was a two days' visit he had with the 
poets to Vallombrosa in 1847, when, as he has 
told us in his Easy Chair, they " sat under the 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 77 

great trees upon the lawn-like hillsides near the 
convent, or in the seats in the dusky convent 
chapel, while Robert Browning, at the organ, 
chased a fugue of Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, 
or dreamed out upon twilight keys a faint, throb- 
bing toccata of Galuppi." As one of the thou- 
sand young Americans who had read with eager 
enthusiasm Mrs. Browning's recently published 
Poems, which, he confessed, had a " more general 
and hearty welcome in the United States than 
any English poet since the time of Byron and 
Company," he had met them at their own tea 
table a few days before. This was the first year 
of their married life. As he gave her Margaret 
Fuller's Essay in the New York Tribune he noted 
how " deeply and most intelligently " she re- 
garded America and the Americans, feeling a 
" kind of enthusiastic gratitude to them for their 
generous fondness of her poetry." In all her 
conversation, " so mild and tender and womanly, 
so true and intense and rich with rare learning," 
he perceived a " girl-like simplicity and sensi- 
tiveness, and a womanly earnestness that took 
the heart captive." 



78 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

George Ticknor and Mr. Palfrey, as guests at 
the Moncton Milnes breakfast, added another 
link to the chain connecting the Brownings to the 
United States. Later, when in Florence, Mrs. 
Browning refers to " tete-a-tetes " with Theodora 
Parker, who had been " making a little Christmas 
book for the young to prove how they should 
keep Christmas without a Christ." Upon his 
death she wrote Miss Haworth that she felt " very 
sorry. There was something high and noble 
about the man, though he was not deep in pro- 
portion." When Mr. Parker first met the 
Brownings in Rome he wrote an American friend 
that he " liked her much. He too seems a good 
fellow, full of life." They both seemed to him 
" intense Italians." A few weeks later (Jan- 
uary, i860), he wrote of meeting them again. 
" very pleasant people they are, too. I rejoice 
in them." 

Browning's fullness of life was what impressed 
Phillips Brooks when he met him in England in 
later years (1865-66) ; "one of the nicest people 
to pass an evening with," he wrote, " cordial and 
hearty as a dear old uncle, shakes your hand as 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 79 

if he were really glad to see you." He seemed 
to him " very like some of the best of Thackeray's 
London men." He even called him " a full- 
souled American." As to his talk, he said it 
" wasn't Sordello and it wasn't as fine as Para- 
celsus, but nobody ever talked more nobly, truly, 
and cheerily than he." It was a fine compliment 
he paid him, when he declared he went home and 
slept, after hearing him, as one does " after a 
fresh starlight walk with a good, cool breeze on 
his face." 

Upon the death of Browning in 1889, he rep- 
resented the heart of the American students when 
he wrote his brother Arthur, " We will mingle 
our tears in memory of Browning and Lightfoot." 
Fittingly his heartfelt prayer closed the beautiful 
Browning memorial service which followed in 
King's Chapel, Boston. 

This fullness of life of Browning, this sym- 
pathy with all phases of nature and human nature, 
doubtless led Henry James to say that he was 
the " accomplished, saturated, sane, sound man 
of the London world, and the world of culture, of 
whom it is impossible not to believe that he had 



8o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

arrived somehow for his own deep purpose at the 
enjoyment of a double identity." (Life of Story.) 

Some of the most comforting words from the 
Browning home were sent to friends across the 
Atlantic. To a Brooklyn lady whose daughter 
had suddenly died Mrs. Browning wrote : " Hear- 
ing of such things makes us silent before God, 
What must it be to experience them? I have 
suffered myself very heavy afflictions, but the 
affliction of the mother I have not suffered, and I 
shut my eyes to the image of it./ Only where 
Christ brings His cross He brings His presence, 
and where He is, none are desolate, and there is 
no room for despair. At the darkest you have 
felt a hand through the dark, closer perhaps and 
tenderer than any touch dreamt of at noon. As 
He knows His own, so He knows how to com- 
fort them — using sometimes the very grief itself, 
and straining it to the sweetness of a faith unat- 
tainable to those ignorant of grief." 

This Christian attitude of mind illustrates what 
Peter Bayne says in his Essay on Mrs. Browning : 
" Mrs. Browning is a Christian poetess not in the 
sense of appreciating, like Carlyle, the loftiness of 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 81 

the Christian type of character, not in the sense of 
adopting, like Goethe, a Christian machinery for 
artistic self-worship, not even in the sense of 
preaching, like Wordsworth, an august but ab- 
stract morality, but in the sense of finding, like 
Cowper, the whole hope of humanity bound up 
in Christ and taking all the children of her mind 
to him, that He may lay His hand on them and 
bless them." 

From the first of the Italian life, American 
artists seem to have been especially favored by 
the Brownings. Hiram Powers, the sculptor, 
with those " great burning eyes of his," was a 
chief friend and favorite — a " most charming, 
simple, straight-forward, genial American." His 
family, as well as work, claimed personal atten- 
tion. William Wetmore Story and his wife were 
also favored friends ; " he, the son of Judge Story, 
and full of all sorts of talent, and she, one of 
those cultivated and graceful American women 
who take away the reproach of the national want 
of refinement." From the first of their meeting, 
in 1848, courtesies had been extended. Brown- 
ing, at this time, as Story wrote James Russell 



82 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

Lowell, had " straight black hair, small eyes, wide 
apart, which he twitches constantly together, a 
smooth face, a slightly aquiline nose, and man- 
ners nervous and rapid. He has a great vivacity, 
but not the least humor, some sarcasm, consider- 
able critical faculty, and very great frankness and 
friendliness of manner and mind." " Mrs. 
Browning," he continues, sat " buried up in a 
large easy-chair, listening and talking very quietly 
and pleasantly, with nothing of that peculiarity 
which one would expect from reading her poems. 
Her eyes are small, her mouth large, she wears 
a cap and long curls. Very unaffected and pleas- 
ant and simple-hearted is she, and Browning 
says, " her poems are the least good part of 
her." He also writes his poet-friend of reading 
at his weekly " at home " on Sunday evenings the 
Biglow Papers, when, giving as well as he could 
" the true Yankee note," which had " convulsed 
audiences of other evenings," the Brownings were 
quite as much amused and delighted as he him- 
self. Later he is writing of their " constant and 
delightful intercourse " at the Baths of Lucca 
(August, 1853), when they interchanged "long 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 83 

evenings together two or three times a week." 
" We like them very much," he continues. " They 
are so simple, unaffected, and sympathetic ;" both 
are " busily engaged in writing, he on a new 
volume of lyrical poems and she on a tale or novel 
in verse." He is pleased to tell his old friend 
that both of them " seemed greatly to have taken 
to him and M.," adding, " we all join in stand- 
ing on the ramparts and waving our handker- 
chiefs for you to return." In this same letter he 
says : " Browning does not smoke ; it is his great- 
est defect; but he tells me that Tennyson does 
excessively." (Life of Story.) But if they 
could not smoke together, they all enjoyed the 
" close communion of tea-drinking " between the 
two houses. They spent hours together in the 
woods. " The whole day in the woods with 
the Brownings," he wrote. " We went at ten 
o'clock, carrying our provisions. Browning and 
I walked to the spot, and then, spreading shawls 
under the great chestnuts, we read and talked the 
live-long day, the Lima at our feet bubbling on, 
clear and brown over the stones, and the distant 
rock-ribbed peaks taking the changes of the 



8 4 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

hours. In the afternoon we took a long walk 
through the grove, and found wondrous fungi, 
some red as coral." Books are exchanged. 
Browning lends Milnes's Life of Keats, which 
Mrs. Story reads aloud to her husband as he 
works in his studio ; while Mrs. Story carries to 
Mrs. Browning her copy of Jane Eyre, which 
Henry James, in telling of the fact, says was " al- 
most certainly that of the American pirated form 
contained in one of the parcels arriving from 
Boston ' per Nautilus,' the blessed little New 
England sailing-ship of the time before tariffs, 
which coming straight to Leghorn made our 
friends feel nearer home than anything had yet 
done." 

A loving word is occasionally sent, as when 
Mrs. Browning writes to Story after referring 
to some affair, " May you never be wounded 
again through the objects of your love — the only 
wounds which tell in this life. The rest are 
scratches." 

From Sienna, August, 1859, Story writes 
Charles E. Norton of his continued delight in the 
Brownings, who were then living a stone's throw 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 85 

from him. " Every evening we sit on our lawn," 
he writes, " under the ilexes and cypresses, and 
take our tea and talk until the moon has made the 
circuit of the quarter of the sky." After re- 
ferring to Browning's being " full of life as ever," 
even in good spirits about Mrs. Browning, al- 
though she was " sadly weak and ill," he pictures 
the little Pen as well, and as hearing him, as he 
writes, laughing and playing with his boys and 
daughter Edith on the terrace below his window. 

This life with the Storys and the " excellent 
and noble Brownings " Charles Sumner could not 
forget; for this same year (1859) he is writing 
them his remembrances of " those delicious Tus- 
can evenings on your lawn with Browning and 
the immortal style of Landor." The year be- 
fore, while ill in England, he had found the 
Brownings, as well as Mrs. Jameson, " full of 
kindness " for him. " I like them all very much," 
he wrote Longfellow. In his first visit to 
Europe, some twenty years before, he had met 
Browning, as the author of Paracelsus, and 
Landor as his friend. 

In all the loving intercourse of the Storys and 



86 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

the Brownings, the children were not forgotten. 
In a chatty letter to Edith Story Browning refers 
to her brother's work : " Julian's picture at the 
Grosvenor is admirable in many respects, and 
above the works on each side of it. Waldo's 
statuette is exceedingly good also; they have, 
each of them, enjoyed a better education than 
is easily obtainable here." He also shows his 
appreciation of the work she had sent him — a 
translation of the autobiography of an interesting 
Tuscan sculptor, Giovanni Dupre. (Life of 
Story.) 

In this beautiful Italian life, the poet helped 
the artist and the artist the poet. It was after a 
visit to Story's studio that Browning wrote his 
Elegy of Sculpture, and its advantage over poetry 
as finding work for uninspired moments. He 
also studied modeling with the sculptor. In 1861 
Mrs. Browning is writing Miss Blagden that Mr. 
Story is " doing Robert's bust, likely to be a 
success" (now in the Venetian palace). This 
was the year he calls Story " the dearest of all 
American friends," closing one of his letters with 
" next year, next hundred years will change 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 87 

nothing in my gratitude and love. Meantime I 
run in and shake hands, and sit by the fire as of 
old, see you always and love you always." 

In his Conversations in a Studio, Mr. Story 
has precious memories of these friends. He re- 
calls her as " pure and noble a spirit as ever in- 
formed this tenement of clay, as rare a genius as 
ever dwelt within this noble city of Florence." 
After her death he wrote his friend Norton that 
she looked " like a young girl — all the outlines 
rounded and filled up, all traces of disease effaced, 
and a smile on her face so living that they could 
not for hours persuade themselves she was really 
dead." In some lines he then wrote he refers 
to Browning's loss, with this comfort : 

'Round every heart some happy memory clings 
Some winds steal music from the slackest strings; 
The coldest heart at moments must aspire, 
The stormiest sense hath hidden sparks of fire. 

All that we ever did were but as dust 

Without these simple words — hope, love, and trust. 

Another American visitor to Casa Guidi was 
Mr. Page, " an earnest, simple, noble artist and 



88 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

man, who carries his Christianity down from his 
deep heart to the point of his brush." The por- 
trait he painted of Browning in 1854 the poet 
considered " magnificent," the " finest even of his 
works " ; he wrote Story : " just the head, which 
he wished to concentrate his art upon in a manner 
which would have been impossible had the can- 
vass been larger." He considered the " result 
marvellous," the " wonder of everybody — no 
such work has been achieved in our time to my 
knowledge at least. I am not qualified to speak 
of the likeness, understand, only of the life and 
effect, which I wish with all my heart had been 
given to my wife's head, or any I like to look 
at, than my own." 

The presentation of the picture by Mr. Page 
to Mrs. Browning gave much delight. " Such 
a princely piece of generosity," wrote Mrs. 
Browning to Mr. Story, " but there was no with- 
standing his admirable delicacy and nobleminded- 
ness, which made the sacrifice of such time and 
labor even easy." 

The year before, Page had painted Charlotte 
Cushman, which, Story wrote Lowell, was " won- 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 89 

derfully fine," the " finest portrait I think I ever 
saw." (Life of Story.) Mrs. Browning heard 
" wonderful things " of it, even declaring that the 
Americans called Page the " American Titian." 
In this same letter she refers to their having met 
Charlotte Cushman twice — once on a balcony 
on the boulevard, when together they saw Louis 
Napoleon enter Paris in immediate face of the 
empire, and once in Florence. " I like the manly 
soul in her face and manners," she wrote. 
" Manly and masculine — an excellent distinc- 
tion of Mrs. Jameson's." Years before (1845), 
Mr. Browning, upon meeting the American 
actress, had called her " clever and truthful — 
loving." 

Christopher Cranch, another American artist 
who enjoyed the Brownings, corroborates what 
William W. Story says of him when he first met 
him in 1849; — that he wore no beard, and that 
his hair was nearly black. He ever loved to re- 
call his " bright, alert, sunny, cordial presence " 
as he sat in his studio in Florence, or as he saw 
him with his poet-wife at Casa Guidi. When ani- 
mated in conversation, he said he had " a way of 



9 o THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

getting up and standing, or walking up and down, 
while still continuing to talk in a fluent vein." 
His manners were " extremely cordial and 
friendly." 

The Brownings' interest in Margaret Fuller is 
another link to the United States. Aside from 
her having been a reviewer of their poems, Mrs. 
Browning had especially noted her work in Rome 
during the siege. So, as " a devoted friend of 
the republicans, and a meritorious attendant on 
the hospitals," she welcomed her when with her 
husband and child she came to Florence. She 
found the Marquis " amiable and gentlemanly," 
but having " no pretension to cope with his wife 
on any ground appertaining to the intellect/' 
" She talks and he listens." She declared she 
always wondered at that species of marriage ; but 
" people are so different in their matrimonial 
ideals that it may answer sometimes." 

When in London Margaret was told that 
Browning had just married Miss Barrett and 
gone to Italy. Her hope then that she might 
meet them there was now fulfilled. " I see the 
Brownings often," she wrote home, " and love 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 91 

and admire them both more and more as I know 
them better. Mr. Browning enriches every hour 
I pass with him, and is a most cordial, true, and 
noble man." 

Margaret Fuller had literary credentials to 
these great poets' attention ; for, as she wrote her 
friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, her two volumes 
of Miscellanies had been " courteously greeted 
in the London journals, and her Essays on Ameri- 
can Literature had been translated and published 
in La Revue I ndc pendant e." And she was ap- 
preciated by them. Mrs. Browning, in writing 
to Miss Mitford in April, 1850, of Margaret's 
intention to sail for home, says they shall be sorry 
to lose her. She calls her " a very interesting 
person, far better than her writings — thought- 
ful, spiritual in her habitual mode of mind; not 
only exalted, but exaltee in her opinions, and yet 
calm in manner." Several months later, after 
mentioning that they spent with them their last 
evening in Italy, she wrote this same friend : 
" Deep called unto deep indeed. Now she is 
where there is no more grief and no more sea; 
and none of the restless in the world, none of the 



92 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

shipwrecked in heart ever seemed to me to want 
peace more than she did. We saw much of her 
last winter, and over a great gulf of differing 
opinion we both felt drawn strongly to her. 
High and pure aspiration she had — yes, and a 
tender woman's heart — and we honored the 
truth and courage in her, rare in woman or man." 
She believed that the work she was preparing in 
Italy would have been more equal to her faculty 
than anything she had previously written, her 
other writings seeming to her inferior to the im- 
pressions her conversation gave. She seemed to 
her to be chiefly known to America " by oral lect- 
ures, and a connection with the newspaper press, 
neither of them happy means of publicity." She 
then refers to the parting gift — "a Bible from 
her child to ours, ' In memory of Angelo Eugene 
Ossoli ' (a strange prophetic expression) " and 
declares Margaret herself was " full of a sad 
presentment." 

Mrs. Browning herself was thoughtful in gifts 
to those she loved. Once upon returning to 
Florence she brought to a young friend not only 
one of her new books and some photographs, but 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 93 

a pair of Roman gold sleeve buttons. And this 
young friend was another American whom the 
Brownings honored — none other than Kate 
Field. Writing to her from Rome in i860 Mrs. 
Browning refers to her as " learning Latin and 
communing with Walter Savage Landor," who 
felt, as they all did, that she was " clever, dear, 
and good," and " the more they had of her the 
better." We all know that one of the best 
tributes paid Mrs. Browning after her death was 
that of this young woman, contributed to an 
American magazine, the Atlantic Monthly of 
September, 1861. Mr. Browning showed his ap- 
preciation in presenting to her in remembrance 
of his wife a pet locket — a crystal center in 
which was shaped her hair in two hearts, the sur- 
rounding gold being a serpent emblem of eter- 
nity. This became another link to the country 
over the sea by becoming on the death of Miss 
Field the possession of another American, her 
biographer, Miss Lilian Whiting. 

But perhaps the greatest favorite among the 
young Americans whom the Brownings honored 
was the sculptor, Harriet Hosmer; indeed, as 



94 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

Kate Field wrote from Rome in 1859, sne was 
" a universal favorite, praised by everyone there." 
Some five years before, Mrs. Browning had writ- 
ten Miss Mitford of the young American sculptor 
being " a great pet of mine and Robert's." She 
" emancipates the eccentric life of a perfectly 
emancipated female from all shadow of blame by 
the purity of hers. She lives here all alone (at 
twenty-two), dines and breakfasts at the cafes 
precisely as a young man would, works from six 
o'clock in the morning till night as a great artist 
must, and this with an absence of pretension and 
simplicity of manners which accord rather with 
the childish dimples in her rosy cheeks than with 
her broad forehead and high aims." Several 
weeks later, upon her return to Florence, Mrs. 
Browning again refers to her as " an immense 
favorite with us both." When about to buy a 
pony for little Robert, however, they decided to 
hunt up someone else than " Hatty Hosmer," to 
ride with him, " because she had been thrown 
thirty times ! " not " on account of bad riding, 
be it observed, but of daring and venturesome 
riding." At about this time Mr. Story, in writ- 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 95 

ing Lowell of his Italian life, speaks of her, with 
Charlotte Cushman, Grace Greenwood, and others, 
as one of the " emancipated females who dwell 
there in heavenly unity." " Hatty," he writes, 
" takes a high hand here with Rome, and would 
have the Romans know that a Yankee girl can 
do anything she pleases, walk alone, ride her 
horse alone, and laugh at their rules." (Life of 
Story.) At another time Mrs. Browning refers 
to her as bringing to them a most charming de- 
sign for a fountain for Lady Marion Alford, add- 
ing, " the imagination is unfolding its wings in 
Hatty." Having met Lady Alford in Rome the 
year before she had found her " very eager about 
literature and art and Robert," for all which 
reasons she declares she should care for her. 
" Hatty calls her divine." She then tells of the 
lady kneeling before Hatty and placing on her 
finger, as a present, the " most splendid ring you 
can imagine, a ruby in the form of a heart, sur- 
rounded and crowned with diamonds. Hatty is 
frankly delighted and says so with all sorts of 
fantastical exaggerations." And who that has 
ever known Harriet Hosmer, the irrepressible, 



96 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

can fail to recall her charming reminiscences of 
this friendship? I can never forget the satisfied 
joy she revealed when showing me the breastpin 
these blest friends gave her; or when telling of 
her visits in their home; or of seeing Salvini as 
Othello in the same theater-box with them ; or of 
having the runaway donkey-ride in a Caretta 
with Robert Browning, supplemented by picnic 
pleasures with them both and other gifted ones. 
One of these excursions has a special interest for 
us as the result of America's appreciation of 
Robert Browning; for, upon receiving a check 
from Messrs. Ticknor and Fields, his Boston 
publishers, the poet came to her studio in high 
glee with the assertion that it was to be spent on 
a picnic excursion to Albano, with her and Fred- 
eric Leighton (afterwards President of the Royal 
Academy) as guests. This was all the more to 
be enjoyed he said, because it was the publishers, 
" own buona grazia " they were not in the least 
obliged to give. " But this is the way they al- 
ways do things," gratefully exclaimed the poet, 
" invariably leaving us their debtors." 

It was to this young American, this same 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 97 

" Hatty Hosmer," that Mrs. Browning finally 
consented to sit for the now famous Clasped 
Hands, which symbolize, as Hawthorne says in 
his Marble Fazvn, " the individuality and heroic 
union of two high poetic lives." Only " Hatty " 
shall cast them, " I will not sit to the Formatore," 
she declared. (Private letter of Miss Hosmer.) 
Another link of the Brownings to the United 
States, which, however, Mrs. Browning did not 
live to see, was the marriage of their son to an 
American woman. Thus an American came to 
be the presiding mistress over the loved books 
and treasures as gathered in the home of Robert 
Barrett Browning, the Rezzonico Palace in 
Venice ; and to her came a share in the ministry 
of the last days of the poet-husband. " His 
death," she wrote Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore (to 
whom he had written some of his last letters) 
" was a fitting close in every respect to such a 
noble life. . . . He had been so full of life, 
and was so happy in our new home, that when his 
illness came it was like a thunderbolt out of a 
clear sky." After saying that he was glad his 
illness had happened in Venice and not in Lon- 



98 THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

don she said he was " touchingly grateful " for 
all that they had tried to do for his recovery. 
" God knows it was our best," she added. " But 
his time to go had come ; and we all feel grateful 
that it came as it did, that his falling asleep was 
so peaceful." Referring to the ceremony at 
Westminster Abbey she declared it was " beyond 
words impressive, and as one would have desired 
it to be in every way. Pen was immensely 
touched by the fitting music to his mother's beau- 
tiful words." 

To another American, William Wetmore Story, 
of all the many friends, was given the charge of 
affairs consequent upon the death of the poet; 
while of all those who ministered charming hospi- 
tality and loving appreciation in the last years 
two American ladies, Mrs. Arthur Bronson and 
Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, must take the lead. Mrs. 
Bronson, in the Century magazine (1900 and 
1902) has pictured their life at Asolo and Venice, 
and the poet has ever associated her with his last 
book Asolando. It was when the Storys were 
visiting at the Asolo home of this " supremely 
amiable countrywoman," as James calls her, that 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 99 

Browning, not long before his death, " so well and 
in such force, brilliant and delightful as ever," 
said, as he stood by the gate after a most tender 
farewell : " We have been friends for over forty 
years without a break." Upon hearing of his 
death the poet-sculptor " spent the evening in 
tears and in talks about him and the old time." 
All he could do at the funeral, he wrote Mr. 
Norton, was to lay on the coffin two wreaths, 
" one of those exquisite white Florence roses, and 
the other of laurel. She is a great loss to litera- 
ture," he added, " to Italy and to the world — 
the greatest poet among women." 

It is to an American, Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, 
through the gift in 1882 to the New York Metro- 
politan Museum of Art of a large painting, The 
Meuse from Bouvigne, and to the Boston Art 
Museum of another called Solitude, that America 
perpetuates the work of the artist-son. It finally 
remained for an American genius, Mrs. H. H. . 
Beach, to give some of the best musical settings 
to his poems, and an American poet, Richard 
Watson Gilder, to write one of the most original 
poems upon his death : 

LofC. 



ioo THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 

THE TWELFTH OF DECEMBER, 1889. 

On this day Browning died? 

Say rather: On the tide 
That throbs against those glorious palace walls; 

That rises — pauses — falls 
With melody and myriad-tinted gleams ; 

On that enchanted tide 
Half-real, and half-poured from lovely dreams, 
A soul of Beauty — a white, rhythmic flame — 
Passed singing forth into the Eternal Beauty whence it 
came. 

It was also an American, Professor Hiram 
Corson, who organized the first Browning society 
of any land, the Browning Society of Cornell 
University. This, organized some five years be- 
fore the London society in University College. 
London (1881), was the result of a conference 
between Mr. Corson and Dr. Furnivall, when the 
American scholar was cordially invited to lecture 
before the society the following year. The so- 
cieties that followed in America — the Syracuse, 



Note. — Written for and read at the Browning Me- 
morial, at King's Chapel, Boston, where was also sung 
a Browning poem, musically set by a Boston lady, Clara 
K. Rogers. 



THE BROWNINGS AND AMERICA 101 

Philadelphia, Baltimore, and others — originated 
more or less from Professor Corson's lectures and 
readings. 

It remained at last for the Boston Browning 
Society to give in Boston, for the first time on 
any stage, in March, 1902, the tragedy of The 
Return of the Druses. A few years before, 
1899, it had given the first stage representation 
of Pippa Passes, in six scenes, with music written 
for the occasion. 

While the work of the poet-husband is thus 
being perpetuated in the United States, the gifted 
wife is not forgotten. The unique, beautiful 
Browning room in Wellesley College, Wellesley, 
Mass., with its Browning windows, its Browning 
autographs, and Story bust, is a perpetual re- 
minder of the love of young women. New edi- 
tions of her work, lovingly edited by well- 
equipped Americans, are a continual reminder of 
her who " loved America," and who publicly de- 
clared : 

For I am bound by gratitude, 

By love and blood, 
To brothers of mine across the sea, 
Who stretch out kindly hands to me. 



I 

FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MRS. 

BROWNING'S DEATH, 

JUNE 29, 1861. 

" 'Tis beautiful," she faintly cried, 
Then closed her weary eyes and died. 
So stands plain fact on history's page, 
Attested to by friend and sage. 
But in our hearts the fact grows bright, 
Illumined with immortal light. 
For open eyes saw heaven's shores, 
And life, not death, revealed its stores. 

" 'Tis beautiful." It must be so, 
If such a soul, 'midst parting's woe, 
Could with truth's perfect clearness see 
The secret of life's mystery; 
Could know that fullest life of man 
Needs heaven's light to round God's plan. 

O woman-soul, without a peer, 

We thank thee more and more each year, 

For this sweet proof of beauty's power 

Beyond earth's transitory hour. 

It calms our hours of doubt and pain, 

And beautifies earth's troubled reign, 

To feel that thou art sending still 

This same sweet message of God's will, 

Born of fruition's grander sight, 

Of perfect beauty, peace, and light. 

102 



II 

ROBERT BROWNING. 

a peace out of pain, 

Then a light, then thy breast. 
O thou soul of my soul, I shall clasp thee again, 
And with God be the rest! 

— Prospice. 
Fulfilled, December 12, 1889. 
Oh, the blessed fruition 
Of peace out of pain ! 
Of a light without darkness, 

A clasping again! 
Of a full soul's reunion 
In Love's endless reign! 

Sing, O Earth, with new joy 

At this victory won! 
For the faith that endured 

'Till the setting of sun ! 
For the hope that shone clear 

Through the mighty work done! 
For the love that sought God 

To guide love here begun! 
Sing, O Earth, with new joy 

For such victory won! 

Elizabeth Porter Gould 
103 



INDEX 

Page 

Abell, Edith 66 

" Agamemnon La Saissaz and Dramatic 

Idyls" 44 

Alexandria Theological Seminary. 28 

Alford, Lady Marion 95 

Alma-Tadema 67 

Anderson, Mary 66 

" Anniversary of Mrs. Browning's death " 102 

Arcturus 13, 18, 22 

Art Museum, Boston 99 

Asolo 98 

" Asolando " 42, 98 

" Athenaeum " 21 

" Atlantic Monthly " 93 

Aurora Leigh 26, 27, 28, 55 

Bacon, Delia 64 

Baltimore (Browning Society) 101 

Bancroft, George 43 

Barrett, Elizabeth 9, 12, 13, 14, 18, 47, 90 

Baths of Lucca 82 

Bayne, Peter 80 

Beach, Mrs. H. H. A 99 

105 



io 6 INDEX 

Page 

Beecher, Henry Ward 69 

" Bells and Pomegranates " 11, 34 

" Biglow Papers " 82 

Blagden, Miss 52, 58, 71, 86 

" Blithedale Romance " 65 

" Blot on the Scutcheon " 20 

Boston, Massachusetts 35, 79, 101 

Boston Anti-Slavery Bazar 49 

Boyd, Hugh Stuart 15, 17, 19, 24, 26 

British Museum 39 

" Broadway Journal " 47 

Bronson, Mrs. Arthur 42, 71, 98 

Bronson, Edith 42 

Brooks, Phillips 28, 78 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 

45, 47, 54, 63, 64, 72, 73, 94, 102 

Browning, Robert 10, 20, 34, 35, 55, 62, 64, 65, 

79, 82, 83, 103 

Browning, Robert Barrett 94, 97 

Browning, Robert Barrett, Mrs 97, 98 

Browning Memorial Service 79, 100 

Browning Society, Boston 101 

Browning Society, Cornell University. . . . 100 

Browning Society, London 100 

Browning Society Papers 55 

Browning Windows, Wellesley College. . . 101 

Bryant, William Cullen 21 

"Bull's Run" 55 



INDEX 107 

Page 

California 71 

Carlyle, Thomas 33, 73, 80 

Carman, Bliss. 43, 44 

Carter, Robert 18 

" Casa Guidi," Florence 71, 87, 89 

" Caterina to Camoens " 18 

" Century Magazine " 43, 98 

Channing, William H 70 

Chicago and Alton Railroad 39 

Civil War 50, 56 

Clarke, Helen A 38 

" Clasped Hands " 97 

" Conversations in a Studio " , 87 

Conway, Moncure D 38, 70 

Cooke, George Willis « 38 

Cornell University 36 

Corson, Hiram 36, 100, 101 

Cowper, 81 

" Cowper's Grave " 17 

Cranch, Christopher P 89 

Crawford, Thomas 57 

Curtis, George William j6 

Cushman, Charlotte 88, 89, 95 

" Democratic Review " 13, 16 

" Dial " (Boston) 34 

Dickens, Charles 22, 45 

" Drama of Exile " 9, 24, 26 



io8 INDEX 

Page 

" Dred " 27 

Duchess of Argyle 61 

Dupre, Giovanni 86 

Duyckinck, Evert A 13 

"Easy Chair" 76 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 33, 38, 69, 91 

" English Notes " 64 

" Epilogue of Dramatic Idyls " 42 

" Essay on Carlyle " 33 

" Essay on Mind " 9, 13, 70 

" Essays on American Literature " 91 

" Evening Mirror " 13, 46, 47 

Field, Kate . . 93, 94 

Fields, James T 65, 69, 73, 74, 75 

Fordham Cottage 12 

Fuller, Margaret 24, 34, 64, yj, 90, 91 

Furnivall, Dr 100 

Garnett, Richard 38 

Gilder, Richard Watson 99, 100 

Goethe 81 

Gould, E. P 102, 103 

" Graham's Magazine " 13, 16, 18, 21 

" Greek Slave " (Powers) 56 

Greenwood, Grace 95 

"Grief" (Sonnet) 18 



INDEX 109 

Page 

Harrison's Life of Poe 13 

Harvard College 28 

Haworth, Miss , 30, 52, 59, 78 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 25, 61, 64, 65, 97 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Mrs 61, 62 

Hawthorne, Rose 63, 69 

Hawthorne, Una 62, 69 

Hemans, Mrs 16, 20 

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 38 

Hillhouse, James 46 

Hillard, George S y2, 73 

Home, Richard H 11,21 

Hosmer, Harriet 93, 94, 95, 97 

Howe, Julia Ward 47, 48 

Howells, William D 38 

Hoxie, E. C 27, 40 

" International Copyright " 22, 23 

Ipsen's " Portuguese Sonnets " in Brown- 
ing Palace, Venice 39 

Irving, Washington 9, 22, 23 

" Italian Lyrics " 31 

" Italy and America " 52 

Italy' 51, 90, 91 

Jameson, Anna (Mrs.) . . 31, 49, 50, 60, J2 73, 

85,89 
James, Henry 79 



no INDEX 

Page 

Jane Eyre 84 

Keats 47, 84 

Kensal Green Cemetery 70 

Kenyon, John 11, 54, 73 

King's Chapel, Boston 79, 100 

Kinney, Elizabeth C 76 

Kinney, Hon. W. B j6 

" La Revue Independente " 91 

Landor, Walter Savage 73, 85, 93 

"L. E. L." 16 

Leighton, Frederick (Sir) 96 

Letter of Mrs. Browning, first time pub- 
lished '. 63 

" Letters from Palmyra " 75 

Lightfoot, Mr 79 

Lincoln's " Inaugural Address " 51 

"Little Nell" 22 

Longfellow, Henry W 42, 85 

"Loved Once" 18 

Lowell, James Russell. . 18, 19, 45, 57, 69, 81, 

82, 88, 95 

"Luria" 36 

Marsh, Hon. George 76 

Martin, Mrs 24, 25, 45, 50 

Mathews, Cornelius 13, 20, 21, 23 



INDEX in 

Page 

" Men and Women " 29, 40 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

City 99 

Miller, Joaquin 71 

Milnes, Moncton 64, 78 

Milton 17 

Mitford, Miss. . 24, 47, 49, 54, 58, 59, 69, 71, 

74, 91, 94 

Montaiito Villa 61 

Moore, Mrs. Bloomfield 43, 97, 98, 99 

Motley's " American Crisis " 54 

Moulton, Mrs. Louise Chandler 38 

Motherwell 46 

Napoleon 32 

Napoleonic Poems 31 

" Nautilus " 84 

New York Independent 31, 32, 52 

New York Tribune 17, 34, 77 

Niagara Falls 70 

" North American Review " 13, 16, 34 

Norton, Charles Eliot 58, 84, 87, 99 

Norton, Mrs 16, 20 

"Official Guide" 39 

" Orion" 21 

Osgood, Frances S 12 

Ossoli, Angelo Eugene 92 



ii2 INDEX 

Page 

Ossoli, Marquis 90 

Page, Mr 87, 88, 89 

Paine's " Age of Reason " and "Rights of 

Man " 9 

" Pain in Pleasure " 18 

Palfrey, Mrs 78 

" Paracelsus " 1 1, 34, 79 

" Paradise Lost " 36, 37 

Parker, Theodore yS 

" Parleyings with certain people " 44 

" Passion Flowers " (Howe) 47 

" Pauline: a fragment of a Confession ". . 36 

Peabody, Elizabeth P 61 

"Pen" 85, 98 

Philadelphia (Browning Society) ........ 101 

Pierce, General Franklin 49 

" Pippa Passes " 66, 101 

" Plays and Poems " 34 

Poe, Edgar Allan 9, 12, 25, 46 

" Poems of Congress " 30, 31 

" Politian " 46 

Porter, Charlotte 38 

Powers, Hiram 56, 81 

Pratolino, Italy 76 

" Prometheus Bound " 13 

The Proctors 73 



INDEX 113 

Page 

Rabbi Ben Ezra 66 

Railway Time Table 39 

" Rapping Spirits " 58 

" Raven " (Poe) 9, 10, 11, 46 

Requests for autographs 71 

Rezzonico Palace, Venice 86, 97 

" Rhapsody of Life's Progress " 20 

" Rhyme of the Duchess May " 25 

Richmond, Virginia 57 

Rogers, Clara K 100 

Salvini, Tommaso 96 

Sarianna Browning 34 

" Septimius " 69 

" Seraph and Poet " 18 

Shelley 47 

Shillaber, B. P. (Mrs. Partington) 44 

Sigourney, Mrs 19, 46 

" Six Months in Italy " 73 

" Solitude " (painting of Robert Barrett 

Browning) 99 

" Sonnets from the Portuguese " 29, 39 

Stedman, Edmund Clarence. . 17, 30, 37, 41, 55 

Stoddards, The 27, 69 

Story, William Wetmore. . 55, 64, 81, 86, 87, 

89, 94, 98 

Story, Edith 86 

Story, Julian 86 



ii4 INDEX 

Page 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher 57, 60, 6 1 

Sturgis, Russell 70 

" Summing up " (Independent) 32 

Sumner, Charles 85 

" Superstition " (Sonnet) 18 

Syracuse Browning Society 100 

" Tamerlane " 36 

Taylor, Bayard 27, 57, 67, 69 

Tennyson, Alfred 46, 47, 83 

Thaxter, Celia 27, 40, 41 

Thaxter, Levi Lincoln 27, 40, 42 

" The Case of M. Valdemar " 11 

" The Child and the Watcher " 18 

" The Cry of the Human " 17 

" The Knickerbocker " 23 

" The Lady's Yes " 18 

"The Liberty Bell" 49 

" The Maiden's Death " 18 

" The Meuse from Bouvigne " (picture) . . 99 

" The Pathfinder " 20 

"The Pioneer" 18 

" The Return of the Druses " 101 

" The Ring and the Book " 36 

" The Rubaiyat " 39 

" The Runaway Slave " 48 

" The Seraphim " 13, 15, 16 

"The Sleep" 17 

" The Soul's Expression " 18 



INDEX 115 

Page 

" The Union " (newspaper) 17 

" The Union Flag " 17 

Thompson, John R., 13 

Ticknor and Fields, 96 

Ticknor, George 78 

Torrey, Bradford 42 

Tuckerman, Henry T 19 

Turner, Ross 39 

" Uncle Tom's Cabin " 59 

University College, London 100 

Vallombrosa j6 

Venice, 97, 98 

Victorian Poets, Stedman 17 

Virginia Poe 12 

Ware, Henry 75 

Webb, General Watson j6 

Webster, Daniel 22 

Wellesley College (Browning room) 101 

Westland, Mr 26 

Westminster Abbey 98 

White, Andrew D 67, 68 

Whiting, Lilian 93 

Willis, Nathaniel P 46 

Woodberry, George E 38 

Wordsworth 81 

"Work" (Sonnet) 18 

" Work and Contemplation " (Sonnet) .... 18 



3477-2 



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